Nothing Tests the Soul Like a Child’s Death

The choking grief brought on by the death of one’s child has always been one of the strongest challenges to religious faith. This is particularly the case with stillbirth, a calamity affecting more than 30,000 babies--and their parents--each year in the United States. It is a disorienting tragedy, ambushing parents with a cruel paradox: death before life, the ending before the beginning, a funeral instead of a christening, the stale pall of death over the young body of new life, a first hello as a final goodbye.

After our son was stillborn, my wife and I--like so many other parents who have lost children at birth or early in life--were sentenced to a lifetime of mystery. Who would he have become? What would he have done with his life? We were condemned not only to grief, but to curiosity. And in never knowing him and how he might have lived, we also lost a measure of self-knowledge and intimacy with one another. We would never find out who we each might have become as his father and mother, how his life would have caused us to change and grow.

In child loss, Mark Twain’s observation of grief is most true: “Losing a loved one is like having your house burn down; it takes years to realize all that you’ve lost.”

Indeed, through the years the tendrils of grief can creep into the soul, altering one’s psyche and relationships in mysterious ways. The American presidency has become a sort of public illustration of this phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge each bore the immense stress of losing young sons while in office; John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both had their already complex characters enduringly altered by neonatal death. Still today, George Bush cannot discuss the death of his 3-year-old daughter--which occurred about a half-century ago--without a tearful, inarticulate stammering.

From the melancholia of Lincoln and the rueful taciturnity of Coolidge, to the reckless hedonism of Kennedy, the strange familial detachment of Reagan and the emotional aphasia of George Bush, we see in these men’s demeanors the reverberations of soul-trauma. The mourning of parents who have lost children reminds us that the terrain of the psyche is not as well charted as we like to believe. The 21st century sees us mapping the brain and reading DNA, yet the dark and tortuous tunnels of trauma into which great loss conducts us remain largely unexplored.

What, then, is the human soul to do? Can the oppressive weight of such loss be lifted?

For the believing heart, the answer is a courageous “yes.” For amid the desolation of loss, a redemptive paradox emerges: by being reduced, we grow.

In the experience of being cut back to the root of our selves, we find a concentrated clarity in the nature of our humanity. We see our finitude, vulnerability and deeper immateriality. We sense more urgently than we otherwise do the inherent void within us that cannot be filled but by the healing embrace of the One who, being personal yet infinite, is alone able to integrate and bring meaning to our bewildering human experience. The flaming sorrow of grief becomes the Refiner’s fire, consuming spiritual dross, leaving behind only understanding that cannot be burned. And in its purity, that substance of soul becomes a new and utterly priceless treasure.

Profound loss brings a strange point of contact with the ultimate purposes of life, with the true nature of living and the fantastic reality of the hereafter. Indeed, intense sorrow may well be one of the more under-recognized phenomena supporting the plausibility of God’s existence.

For most people, the initial response to child loss is a rage against God for allowing such tragedy to befall them. Yet why should this be, unless we have a reason to believe matters ought to be different?

It is more than the unusualness or untimeliness of child loss that so provokes us to shake our mortal fists at the most High. We are moved by the violation of the inner analogy to the transcendent that the parent-child relationship represents. As we are designed to mature toward the divine, so our children are intended to be intimately with us for years. We perceive our relationship to our children is more than physiological and emotional. It is a bonding of soul.

Thus, the jolt we experience at their death speaks to us of the metaphysical by heightening our awareness of it. The turmoil of intense sorrow can propel us up to the limits of this world, providing us a hint of the larger order, an ecstatic suspicion that there is an ultimate purpose beyond the dimness of our today.

The truth lying beneath my own grief is that I never felt closer to God than I did in the months after my son died. The end of his life eventually led me to discover a fresh fullness in my own life, and a new knowledge that it can only be a preamble to the greatest discovery that awaits us all.

On Faith is a forum for Orange County clergy and others to offer their views on religious topics of general interest. Submissions, which will be published at the discretion of The Times and are subject to editing, should be delivered to Orange County religion page editor Jack Robinson.