On Losing a Child

Thinking on recent mass shootings, I was reminded of these lines from Brett Dennen’s song “Ain’t No Reason“:

A window and a pigeon with a broken wing
You could spend your whole life working for something
Just to have it taken away

And isn’t that what it must feel like, to lose your child? The Zen master Sengai Gibon (1750-1837), once asked for the key to happiness, wrote in response

Father dies, son dies, grandson dies.

He explained that that is the natural order of things, the order to which we are accustomed, the order that we have accepted. If the order is changed — if the parent must bury the child — it is an enormous tragedy, the destruction of life’s plan.

I am glad to say that my own direct children are both still in good health, but still I worry for my eight billion nephews and nieces. Lately I have grieved over something like the loss of a child: A few years ago I became aware that climate change is speeding up (more than the IPCC is saying), and may soon extinguish the future of the entire human species. That thought filled me with pain for a long time.

And it’s not just climate. It’s all the suffering from unnecessary poverty and wars and other cruelties. And one of those wars could turn into a nuclear war, another way we could all come to an end.

Then I regained hope: Perhaps it is not too late. Some time apparently remains to us — at least a few months, probably a few years — and we do not know, and cannot know, what we may still discover or accomplish in that time, in technology or biology or political psychology, that might still save us somehow.

But now I live with uncertainty about the future. The lives of all our children may soon be cut short (along with the old age of my generation). The right metaphor is not a child killed in a shooting, but a child who is missing. I don’t know whether this metaphorical child of mine is dead or alive. I work every day, in the little ways that I can, in efforts to recruit more people to addressing the climate problem and our other problems and their underlying causes,* in hope of somehow improving the situation. We’re all in this together.

I wish good health to you and yours.

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* I didn’t want to mention it earlier, because it’s a slight change of subject. But I believe that capitalism is the underlying cause of the climate problem, the wars, poverty, etc. Some of my other essays are devoted to explaining that. To end capitalism, we’ll have to change our attitude about each other.

2023 May 10, version 2.02.

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