Goodreads Bookshelf
A Parent's Death
To respect his privacy, I don't want to go into many details, but one of my students lost his mother over the weekend. The funeral mass and calling hours were today.
While I'm personally interested in this young man's welfare and his situation, I'm not particularly interested in blogging about his situation if I can avoid it, yet with my own personal experience this is also a topic that I have thought a lot about. Again, I respect his family's privacy and don't want to infringe upon it. Thus, instead of the particular, I want to write today about the more general. One thing that this reminded me of is how, here in the 21st Century, losing a parent at this age is such a rare occurrence. Many of my colleagues--people who are in the 30s, 40s, or 50s--have not had to deal with the loss of a parent, and almost none of the students have. It's an historical oddity, really. I look at Emerson, whose father died when he was seven, or Poe who'd lost both of his parents by age 2; Keats lost his father at 9, his mother at 15, and a younger brother when he was 23, and personally nursed the latter two until each died of tuberculosis. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I think it's fair to say that in the 19th Century and before, if someone in your own family hadn't died, you certainly knew someone who had lost family members, and this was true almost regardless of your age. It is, of course, nice to live in a time and place where we don't have the specter of death casting his shadow over us, but the fact is that it's not just a temporally-unique phenomenon, it's also geographically limited. We in the "first world" have it like this, but elsewhere it is otherwise. Something we take for granted is really quite unusual.
Obviously, my student is going through a terrible time right now, but I was so thankful to see how many students and teachers went to the funeral home's calling hours this morning to support him and his family. He's involved in the school in so many ways and touched the lives of so many of his peers, and it's heartwarming to see them offering that back to him now. The flip side of the observation I made above, however, is that most of his classmates have not had any similar experience. Seeing it put certain things into perspective for them, I think; as one student said "It makes me want to go home and hug my mother." Still, few of his classmates have truly congruent experiences to relate with him. Fortunately, however, our ability to empathize is not limited to our personal experience, and I am sure that his friends and peers will be a great comfort to him. I know that when my father (and grandmother) died during my freshman year of high school, it meant a lot to me, the way my classmates and people in the community expressed their sympathy, often not through the specific things they said, but just by letting me know that they were there, that they cared. Nothing makes it easy, and there's no magic "cure" for grief, but the love and sympathy of those around us makes it easier, makes it better, and can help one get through. He's a great kid, he's surrounded by great kids, and all kinds of support from family and community. Nothing can make it easy, but I'm sure he'll get through this terrible experience and probably help those around him as much as he is helped.