There is a modern saying that goes like "People who lost their parents are called 'orphans'. People who lost their spouse are called 'widows'. But losing a child is so horrific that people who lost a kid has not even a word".
The reason that there's no word for people who lost a kid is because until yesterday every family lost a child. The word for someone who lost a child was "parent".
This is something I think about. If this happens today, people consider their lives ruined, go into deep depression, get divorced and often never recover. This can't have been the case before in time. How heavily does culture effect the experience and consequences of misforture? It seems to me like we may have some form of entitlement, like spoiled children, that has made us weaker. If that's the case, can we change our culture? I think so and I think we should consider that if it's a possibility.
I don't talk about this very often for obvious reasons, but I've lost a child.
Grief over losing a child is not entitlement, or weakness, or being spoiled. It's grief, as raw and human as it's always been.
It used to be normal for children to die in the mid-1800's-England. Something like 25% of children born didn't make it to their first birthday.
Today, that number is more like 0.34%.
I suspect the difference is that in the 1800's it happened a lot. You weren't the only one. You had people who were empathetic. Nearly any person you'd come in contact with likely had either experienced the same trauma, or loved people who had. That doesn't mean people didn't grieve over the loss. It just meant that living with the grief of a lost child was normal.
In "modern" times? If it happens to you, you're an outlier. Not only are you grieving the loss of your child, you're alone. No one you know has also lost a child. You're grieving the loss of potential, the legal garbage, insurance, funeral costs, you're doing it either with your partner, also grieving, or alone (or maybe worse, with a partner, but still "alone"). The amount of times you'll hear "I can't imagine what that must be like" help reinforce that feeling of being alone, because it's simply true. It's unimaginable. It was for me, and even having experienced it, still is.
Whether it's the 1800s or 2000's, humans are resilient. While losing a child often does lead to depression and divorce, we can heal from these things. We have an advantage over 1800s parents in that we have huge support networks that are no further away than our pockets that blow away whatever community support might have existed in the 1800s. Not to mention medicine and advances in our understanding of human psychology.
And this is why we will disagree. What, by your definition, does "ruin one's life" actually mean? I bet it differs from mine. An easy bet, because we've led different lives with different experiences. What you think of as "ruined" may be my version of "it took 15 years to finally get over something tramautic"
What I see in my own grief, and the many, and I mean many parents who I interact with as part of my own support, is that each of us takes it day by day. Some people have a lot more days of waking up wishing they were dead than other people. Some people channel the grief into starting foundations. None of their behavior is strong, or weak, or entitled, good, bad, right, wrong, or whatever subjective sort of adjective you want to categorize it with. Nor are their lives "ruined", even if they're 14 years into waking up every day wanting to die. Day by day. It's people who have lost someone, someone so innocent, someone they're supposed to protect - there are no words to describe the pain. So while you're trying to decide if someone's grief is "weakness" or "entitlement", they're experiencing it.
Grief is evidence of your love for someone, and in my mind, that sort of love takes a certain sort of strength. To love, knowing it cannot last forever, takes strength. That is as old as humankind itself, and not new, nor a weakness.
> "we may have some form of entitlement, like spoiled children, that has made us weaker"
An alternative way to look at it is that the people of the past were subjected to massive unprocessed trauma at every age, and that made them weaker than us.
Who’s weak and who’s strong in this scenario: a bloody body is presented following a tragic car accident. The body is maimed, broken, but ultimately salvageable.
One person sees the body and shrieks in horror and goes into a fit of panic.
Another (an ER doctor) is cool as a cucumber from years of desensitization, calmly treats and saves the body.
I’d have a hard time describing the ER doctor as “weaker”. They’re unquestionable more capable and useful. And I propose stronger not weaker.
Strength is subjective, especially if your definition is “capability”. That ER doctor may be so desensitized that they are incapable of providing emotional support, and the one who ran may be a therapist who can provide the individual in the car crash emotional support. So in the end both are strong, simply in different ways.
Having more children is near-universal reaction to poor child survival rate, and vice versa. (Though usually it's not about the offspring dying as adults.)
Death was something a lot more people spent a lot more time with than we do now. It was 23 years between the death of my last grandparent and the death of my father...and another 16 year til the death of my Father in law.
My uncle used to tell stories about death when he was growing up (30s or 40s). A line he would use always sticks either me, “back then, when you got sick, you died.”
He would go on to say just how common it was to know a child or adult that died. It was just a normal part of existence.
It used to be that if someone said "Jeff got in a car accident," it usually meant that Jeff was dead or disabled for life.
Today, it simply means that Jeff is going to be 45 minutes late for work.
Since I lived in the "surely dead" era, I still react that way if someone mentions someone getting in a wreck. People must assume I'm upset over Jeff's surely totaled car (something that didn't always happen in the olden days).
Yeah, the short code for it reminds me of the line from Broken Arrow (1996): “I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it.”
It also puts a very different perspective on 1) why you always read in history books "so and so's third wife" and 2) the obsession with things like "child-bearing hips". Starting a family was downright hazardous; modern sensibilities are comparatively unburdened by those problems.
Might have been so obvious it need not have even been mentioned. Just like today, you wouldn’t say “I’m really looking for a healthy woman with an unmutilated face”.
The irony is that up until not long ago it is used to be quite common in a single family to have ten kids, but now a few children (less than five) is the norm.
Even though mother and child mortality is minimized, there are 999 life-altering things that can go wrong.
Take the simplest ones: what % of the population has the kind of mental illness that’ll destroy your relationship with them? E.g. borderline personality, sociopaths, etc.
Easily 5% or more.
That alone is a 1 in 20 chance of your kid ruining a significant portion of your life, not to mention you bringing a kid into the world with an inevitably ruined life.
And then there’s physical disability, not to mention financial burden.
It’s not worth it.
I’m very glad other people roll those dice: I’m happy to live in a populated world. But I don’t touch the dice myself.
i also feel my children ruining my "pleasant calm" life all day and night every day, but when you see them discovering the world, learn how to speak, making their own language by their unconstrained little logical mind, marvelling at the world's tiny wonders which you can't remember ever deemed other than ordinary and given, first connecting the dots themself, acting exactly the way as you did when you were in their age yet completely uniqly, or independently developing the same lovely habits as your long dead grandma... is priceless and worth all the fatigues of sleepless nights for me.
I think 1 in 20 is a bit too high. 1 in 100 maybe to have a significant impact on your life. There are lots of tests now that so you have the chance to abort.
16% of the world population has a significant disability according to the WHO. Most of them are not born with it: age related (dementia, blindness,..), serious work accidents, lasting effects of diseases,...
Loads of them can get treated or won't alter life as much in the western world.
If your family history has no cases of mental illnesses, chances are very low to get them.
For a serious learning disability (not able to attend normal school), it's probably 1 in 20. Most of these kids will still live a fairly normal life in the western world.
Also, chances of disabilities also increase with the age of the parents. Best to have your kids between 20-35 to keep the odds down. Above 40 is a lot more dangerous than under 30.
> In 2021, there were an estimated 14.1 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with [Serious Mental Illness]. This number represented 5.5% of all U.S. adults.
Companies coming up with their own codes to save on telegraphy costs were cool, code books with random letters smooshed together. Obviously telegraph operators had trouble with this, reducing their pace so telegraphy companies banned usage of non-words in telegrams (more on that in the book I mentioned).
From Unicode, it's interesting but not surprising that so many of the codes are for significant personal and business problems, like the birth of children, missed travel connections etc. "Diota" "Amputation is considered unnecessary". "Annexus" "Confined to-day, Twins, one alive, a girl, Mother not expected to live".
Towards the back of the book is shown a very early 'DNS'; abbreviated addresses for businesses. "Supplies, London" meant "Junior Army and Navy Stores Limited", a bit like a generic supplies.co.uk. "Jowoto, London" meant "Johnson, Walker & Tolhurst".
You have to remember that telegrams were expensive, you'd not just send one for anything; it would be for major events (like a birth, or death) and so encoding the variations of that would be worth it.
Amazing that a phrase like "Confined yesterday, Twins, both dead, Mother not expected to live" was given a single code word ("Annosus").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...
"Unicode — The Universal Telegraphic Code Book" https://archive.org/details/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog/mode/2...