Pray with the Pope: The Tragedy of Losing a Child

Every month Fr Chris Chatteris SJ reflects on Pope Francis’ prayer intention

Intention: Let us pray that all parents who mourn the loss of a son or daughter find support in their community and may receive peace of heart from the Spirit of Consolation.

The loss of children used to be commonplace in the era before modern medicine. In the era of incubators, we forget how vulnerable a tiny baby is. In a time of antibiotics and vaccinations, we forget how in the past so many children never made it to adolescence.

There are numerous historical instances when couples lost most or even all of their children. It is hard to imagine the grief caused by these frequent tragedies. Even financially well-off families were not spared — one of the great anxieties of the monarchs of old concerned the survival of their heirs.

Precisely because of the lower survival rate of children in these past times, the tendency was to have more children than we have today. This was probably a natural instinct to ensure sustaining the human population. Those children who survived in a family were, of course, an important source of consolation to their parents as well as vital participants in an economy, especially agrarian, which depended on human labour, and an insurance of being taken care of in old age.

Against the order of things

In societies with access to modern medicine, the powerful assumption is that children will survive to adulthood and into old age, and this makes the tragedy of the loss of a child harder to bear, because it is so unexpected. And with the number of children in families declining, the death of a child might well leave the family with only one or two children, or perhaps even none.

We have become so used to the high survival rate of children that today it seems totally against the order of things for children to die before their parents. But it does happen, sometimes because of our modern lifestyle. For example, we contrive to lose over a million lives every year on our roads, many of them young. Or we fall prey to unhealthy lifestyles, eating, drinking and drugging ourselves into early graves. And, of course, modern life creates conditions for depression and suicide.

Furthermore, the wars which are currently raging around the world also cut short many young lives, both among civilians and combatants.

There is much food for reflection here about how we can avoid the continuing death toll among our children, and we do indeed need to beg the Lord of all consolation to comfort and give peace to those parents who have lost a precious child.