I think rather than not having a word because it’s a universal misery isn’t quite right either. We have lots of words for common emotional tragedies, including widow. Maybe there’s no word for child loss because it’s something we don’t even want to think about — something we never want.
I've been chewing on this vocab.
Sadly so much later I'm thinking about the legal, and therefore financial, reason. "Who gets what?".
Widów/Widower exist because those people have a financial stake. They own "things". Children don't.
Gods. That's depressing.
It keeps the grief hidden, not having a word for it. People don't want to think about the worst thing, so having no word enables that. Parents carry it alone, no communal aspect except for others that have endured the same.
We don't have a word for a child who's lost one parent and has one living. We could use one. It's a distinct experience, but we don't desperately need a word for it. It's not expected to define a person's social identity like "orphan" or "widow(er)." The common or assumed are just that.
its absence in modern English, but not in other languages, does speak a small volume. English has changed significantly even in the last 200 years - right around the time medicine began making real advancements
Yes. I've studied Anglo-Saxon English (~700). We have so little surviving texts to let us know what they would have said in their real lives. My medieval linguistics is poor now. But. People lost their child and wrote about their pain. Look at burial stones Those can go back as far as you would like
In Sanskrit, vilomah means "against natural order" If we are talking about deaths caused by disease in pre vaccination times wouldn't that be with the natural order?
My step mother actually takes sanskrit lessons here at the local banjar temple. She explained it to me. And her understanding of karma is very different, like she thinks if the baby dies it is wrong doing from a past life that predetermines the child to die.
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Sadly so much later I'm thinking about the legal, and therefore financial, reason. "Who gets what?".
Widów/Widower exist because those people have a financial stake. They own "things". Children don't.
Gods. That's depressing.
Maybe we don't have a word for a parent who loses a child for the same reason we don't have a word for a person who loses their car or their toaster.
But speaking as a former foster kid, it's how both the system and a *lot* of adults still view them.