Monday, March 15, 2010
Loss of a Child
During the part when Alex's parents are describing their feelings about their death, it made me curious about just how deep their pain could be. Their struggle reminded me of a book that I read 2 years ago, "Still with me: A daughter's journey of Love and Loss" by Andrea Collier. In that story, The narrator's grandpa recounts his feeligngs about the loss of one of his children. He clearly seems broken up about it still, even though it is fifty years later. He says "You should never have to see your child waste away and die", also also believes that "Losing your child is the worst"(155). Never having known any grief near this magnitude myself, I wondered if Chris' parents were changed by the experience. Chris' mother Billie was described as "weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge that the mind balks at taking its measure"(132). Just what is it about losing a child that has the power to completely shatter someone, as it clearly has done to both Billie and the grandfather? Well, parents bring the child into the world, it's the biggest treasure they have. It comes with a sense of pride and accomplishment. They obviously want their child to be safe, healthy and happy. As they get more and more attached to the child, the more the child seems to become a part of them. I asked my own parents about this, and they said they felt the same way. This is why I think the loss of a child is particularly shattering for a parent, because it dashes some of their own dreams and aspirations as well. Billie in particular seemed a bit frustrated with Alex, saying "I just don't understand why he had to take those kind of chances"(132). This seemed to add another dimension to the grief: dissapointment. In a death where the child has somehow contributed to their own death, as in Chris's case, a sense of failure probably accompanies the initial sadness. Chris's parents seem frustrated that they didn't do something different to "save" Chris, while in "Still with me", where the child died of illness, the grandfather never expressed frustration with the child, only with the circumstances. I think I can now understand just how Chris' parents felt a bit better, and where their sadness and frustration originated from.
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This is a very ionteresting point. When he died ad he parents were notified i did realize that there was not much emotion towards his death. It said that Chris's mother cries every now and then thinking about him but that is all. In "my Sister's Kepper," Kate mother is pretty much emotionally unstable and cant always handle her emotions over her daughter and she has not even died yet. I felt it was strage on how Chris's parents reacted.
ReplyDeleteI like how you describe the relationship between a parent and its child, in how as the child gets older, the parent and child grow a bond that makes one another more and more important to each other’s lives. I think this is very true, and can also apply to pets as well. I have a dog, and I know that if something ever happened to it I would be extremely saddened. When I first got the dog, I was kind of scared of it, as I never had a pet before. But as the years went on and I started getting used to having it around, I got to like it very much. The bond has grown very much similar to how you described a parent-child relationship.
ReplyDeleteI think you made a very interesting point when you said that a sense of failure accompanies the initial sense of sadness for a parent. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can completely understand how a parent would have a sense of failure because the job of a parent is to raise and support their child. His parents probably have a feeling that they failed to raise him properly, as it was the relationship between Chris and his father that partially caused Chris to go on his journey that ultimately lead to his death.
ReplyDeleteI feel like that, it is true that they feel like they do for the reasons described above but I think that the element of feeling failure is common of many other action not only the pain of loosing a child. Almost every person has experienced a situation that they blame themselves for the outcome, despite how little control over the outcome they had. This hyper-criticism is a reflex of humans when tragedies they connect to meet wish to have changed the outcome. One begins to BELIEVE they could have changed the outcome, going to such outlandish lengths as to thinking, as Chris's parents did, that it was their responsibility to foresee this coming and raise their child accordingly. I think this form of hyper-criticism and criticism in general is a roadblock in a person's quest, by forcing guilt on one's self they demoralize themselves and begin to veer from the course. I know that they must have felt extreme sorrow and pain for such a loss, but there come a time that, as upsetting as it is, they can't blame themselves for it or be frustrated because they couldn't truly have been able to change as much as they blame themselves for.
ReplyDeleteThis post reminded me of one of my favorite movies Pay it Forward. The main character is a boy, Trevor, who comes up with an idea to make the world a better place for a social studies project, and idea he calls pay it forward. Not to get too into the plot,in the end the boy ends up getting killed trying to defend a kid at his school. His mother witnessed her own son dying, and clearly there was nothing anyone could do to make her feel better about it. Watching it just left me shocked because not a lot of movies touch on the idea of losing your child and how devastating that is, and thinking about it made me feel horrible when in reality it wasn't affecting me in any way.
ReplyDeleteTonight at drivers ed, i watched this heart wrenching movie about this Florida Olympic diver, Bruce Kimball was driving drunk and ran over this group of kids hanging out on the side of a road. He ended up killing 2 people and seriously injuring 4 others. Everything in this movie was real footage, real interviews, real newscasts. It really shocked me how powerful this story was. This movie highlighted how each person was affected by this tragedy. The parents of one guy that died described a feeling of numbness and anger when he found out. They were unable to function for days at end and that one moment shattered their whole lives. Even though this was motor vehicle homicide, he said that it was the same if someone took a pistol and shot his son dead. Chris' death was different, but it had the same impact on his parents and other peoples lives. Essentially Chris' death wasn't as sudden, but his parents equally suffered. It really hurts the parents so much more than one would imagine. One parent said that driving drunk just doesn't ruin the victim's lives, but it ruins the lives of the family, of friends, of the family of the drunk driver, everyone. Chris' death ended up impacting the world. It wasn't just his parents mourning Chris' death, many others that Chris had befriended, and many that Chris had never even known. This other woman in the movie, a sister of an injured man, described that going into the hospital was the hardest thing she ever had to do- "seeing my brother hurting like that, I'd never realized how much we took each other for granted, and how much i appreciated him." The fiance of the same man commented that it was so hard to see him there one moment, and the next have him gone. Watching these families of victims suffer, it made me get tears in my eyes. It isn't right to have them suffer the way they did. Just like it isn't fair for a parent to loose a child. All these quotes from these parents are essentially universal. Their words and tears are shared my many in the same situation; like by Billie and Walt. Whatever the cause, loosing a child is like the end of the world for many people.
ReplyDeleteGood post Brendan. Of course, any parent would be devastated if they were to lose a child. Parents often consider their kids as almost a continuation of their own lives, carrying on the family name and being their lasting mark on the earth. As you said, Chris' parents were very sad about what happened to Chris but at the same time were sort of beating themselves up for not trying harder to stop him or convince him to explore other areas of life. They feel guilty that part of the cause of his death is their lack of intervention. I feel like they didn't spend enough time with him and that is why he became the isolated, individual person that he was, not used to sharing his emotions with others.
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