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Balming Pain

Reading these lines from Hemingway's letter consoling parents in the loss of their young child made me think about people I know who have lost a child. As horribly tragic and irreparable the event, it seems that the surviving parents came to have a larger impact on the world in some way because of this experience. The death of the child had deepened their humanity. 

Absolutely truly and coldly in the head, though, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.

Maybe there comes a time in the life of the bereaved parent when they make peace with what happened for exactly the reasons Hemingway describes. One of my dear friends who has survived such loss once told me, the pain never goes away but you learn to live with it, create adaptations so that is bearable to live with the pain. Some of these adaptations might involving doing good in the world to honor the memory of the deceased child. That good is a living force and can have the effect of blunting the pain.


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