I can’t imagine the grief of losing a child, and I hope I never experience it. In our minds, at least, and in our cultures, the death of a child violates the natural order of things. My grandmother never spoke much about it, nor my father, but I would hear occasional murmurs about Eloise, the daughter and sister who died at age 2 in 1915. My father would have been her little brother, so he never actually knew her. My grandmother mourned her child the rest of her life, but it was a quiet, intensely personal mourning.
It was that kind of quiet mourning that I discovered when reading An Ordinary Life: Poems by B.H. Fairchild. He did experience the grief from loss of a child when his son Paul died at age 46 in 2017. It’s not the same as losing a young child or an infant, because now an almost full lifetime of experience and memory is packed into the death. And there’s a daughter-in-law and grandchildren to be considered.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Tuesday Readings
The Temple of Mithras and Vince Street Roman Wall – A London Inheritance.
A Headstone Dedication for John S. Taplin – Darren Rawlings at Emerging Civil War.
Things Worth Remembering: The Singing Will Never Be Done – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.
Accused of Spying: Fannie Cowper of Suffolk, Virginia – Jeff Giambrone at Emerging Civil War.
Firefighter Artists of the Blitz – Spitalfields Life.
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