When a child dies—any child—the pain is indescribable. For it goes far beyond the usual pain of a bereavement. When an aged parent dies, when a family member or beloved friend succumbs to sickness or disease, or even meets death in a tragic accident or suicide, we accept the loss, no matter how great, no matter how long we take to get over it, because we see it as part of the human lot, part of the natural order of things.

A child’s death is not part of this natural order, where every living thing has its season of birth, growth and maturity before final decay and death. A child’s death means an upset of this order, because the child is denied the natural unfolding from potentiality to actuality, denied the right of a human being to become a person, that is a human being with lived experience. A child’s death is a travesty of the universal scheme of things, and when a grieving parent asks ‘Why?’, it is an expression of this deep existential anguish at a loss beyond ordinary human understanding.

The cause of a death, for official, legalistic purposes, is listed as either ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, the first being the result of illness or disease, and the second covering all other causes, including accidents and possible adult negligence or even violence, entailing official investigation and, if necessary, prosecution. There is a third cause of death—natural disasters—which, by technicality of name, belongs more to the first innocuous category than the second sinister one, although its victims number in the thousands, the majority being children.

Among the most heart-wrenching scenes on TV of the Asian tsunami of 2004, there was one, from Sri Lanka, of a small girl’s dead body laid on a makeshift platform on the beach, her mother unable to express the pain and shock beyond shrieking, and repeatedly picking up the legs of the child in each hand and hitting her forehead with them. It is a picture that is forever seared in my memory, as is the gentler one of a young Singapore mother cradling her dead baby in her arms, while her husband looks on, the infant dressed in a beautiful flowing baby gown of white lace, complete with white bonnet, mittens and bootees.

Whatever the cause of a child’s death, it is unnatural in every sense of the word, a brutal tragedy without catharsis.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...