By Fr Ron Rolheiser
Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person, particularly one’s own child. There are many mothers and fathers, with broken hearts, having lost a daughter, a son, or a grandchild. Despite time and even the consolation of faith, there often remains a wound that will not heal.
There’s a reason why this wound is so unrelenting, and it lies not so much in a lack of faith, as in a certain lack within nature itself. Nature equips us for most situations, but it does not equip us to bury our young.
Death is always hard. There’s a finality and an irrevocability that cauterizes the heart. This is true even if the person who has died is elderly and has lived a full life. Ultimately nothing prepares us, fully, to accept the deaths of those whom we love.
But nature has equipped us better to handle the deaths of our elders. We are meant to bury our parents. That’s the way nature is set up, the natural order of things. Parents are meant to die before their children, and generally that’s the way it happens. This brings its own pain. It’s not easy to lose one’s parents or one’s spouse, one’s siblings, or one’s friends. Death always exacts its toll. However, nature has equipped us to handle these deaths.
Metaphorically stated, when our elders die, there are circuits in our hardwiring that we can access and through which we can draw some understanding and acceptance. Ultimately, the death of a fellow adult washes clean, and normality returns because it’s natural, nature’s way, for adults to die. That’s the proper order of things. One of life’s tasks is to bury one’s parents.
But it’s unnatural for parents to bury their children. That’s not the way nature intended things, and nature has not properly equipped us for the task. Again, to utilize the metaphor, when one of our children dies (be it through natural disease, accident, or suicide) nature has not provided us with the internal circuits we need to open to deal with this.
The issue is not, as with the death of our elders, a matter of proper grieving, patience, and time. When one of our children dies, we can grieve, be patient, give it time and still find that the wound does not get better, that time does not heal, and that we cannot fully accept what’s happened.
A hundred years ago Alfred Edward Housman wrote a famous poem entitled, To An Athlete Dying Young. At one point he says this to the young man who has died:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay.
Sometimes a young death does freeze forever a young person’s beauty that, given time, would eventually have slipped away. To die young is to die in full bloom, in the beauty of youth.
However, that addresses the issue of the young person who is dying, not the grief of those who are left behind. I’m not so sure they, the ones left behind, would say: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away.” Their grief is not so quick to slip away because nature has not provided them with the internal circuits needed to process what they need to process. We are more likely to feel a darkness of soul that W.H. Auden once expressed in the face of the death of a loved one:
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. (Twelve Songs)
When one of our children dies, it’s easier to feel what Auden expresses. Moreover, even understanding how much against nature it is to have to bury one of your own children does not bring that child back, nor put things back to normal, because it’s abnormal for a parent to bury a child.
However, what that understanding can bring is an insight into why the pain is so deep and so unrelenting, why it is natural to feel intense sorrow, and why no easy consolation or challenge is very helpful. At the end of the day, the death of one’s child has no answer.
It’s also helpful to know that faith in God, albeit powerful and important, does not take away that wound. It’s not meant to. When one of our children dies, something has been unnaturally cut off, like the amputation of a limb. Faith in God can help us live with the pain and the unnaturalness of being less than whole, but it does not bring back the limb or make things whole again. In effect, what faith can do is teach us how to live with the amputation, how to open that irreparable violation of nature to something and Someone beyond us, so that this larger perspective, God’s heart, can give us the courage to live healthily again with an unnatural wound.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is currently serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
