This is something I think about. If this happens today, people consider their lives ruined, go into deep depression, get divorced and often never recover. This can't have been the case before in time. How heavily does culture effect the experience and consequences of misforture? It seems to me like we may have some form of entitlement, like spoiled children, that has made us weaker. If that's the case, can we change our culture? I think so and I think we should consider that if it's a possibility.
I don't talk about this very often for obvious reasons, but I've lost a child.
Grief over losing a child is not entitlement, or weakness, or being spoiled. It's grief, as raw and human as it's always been.
It used to be normal for children to die in the mid-1800's-England. Something like 25% of children born didn't make it to their first birthday.
Today, that number is more like 0.34%.
I suspect the difference is that in the 1800's it happened a lot. You weren't the only one. You had people who were empathetic. Nearly any person you'd come in contact with likely had either experienced the same trauma, or loved people who had. That doesn't mean people didn't grieve over the loss. It just meant that living with the grief of a lost child was normal.
In "modern" times? If it happens to you, you're an outlier. Not only are you grieving the loss of your child, you're alone. No one you know has also lost a child. You're grieving the loss of potential, the legal garbage, insurance, funeral costs, you're doing it either with your partner, also grieving, or alone (or maybe worse, with a partner, but still "alone"). The amount of times you'll hear "I can't imagine what that must be like" help reinforce that feeling of being alone, because it's simply true. It's unimaginable. It was for me, and even having experienced it, still is.
Whether it's the 1800s or 2000's, humans are resilient. While losing a child often does lead to depression and divorce, we can heal from these things. We have an advantage over 1800s parents in that we have huge support networks that are no further away than our pockets that blow away whatever community support might have existed in the 1800s. Not to mention medicine and advances in our understanding of human psychology.
And this is why we will disagree. What, by your definition, does "ruin one's life" actually mean? I bet it differs from mine. An easy bet, because we've led different lives with different experiences. What you think of as "ruined" may be my version of "it took 15 years to finally get over something tramautic"
What I see in my own grief, and the many, and I mean many parents who I interact with as part of my own support, is that each of us takes it day by day. Some people have a lot more days of waking up wishing they were dead than other people. Some people channel the grief into starting foundations. None of their behavior is strong, or weak, or entitled, good, bad, right, wrong, or whatever subjective sort of adjective you want to categorize it with. Nor are their lives "ruined", even if they're 14 years into waking up every day wanting to die. Day by day. It's people who have lost someone, someone so innocent, someone they're supposed to protect - there are no words to describe the pain. So while you're trying to decide if someone's grief is "weakness" or "entitlement", they're experiencing it.
Grief is evidence of your love for someone, and in my mind, that sort of love takes a certain sort of strength. To love, knowing it cannot last forever, takes strength. That is as old as humankind itself, and not new, nor a weakness.
> "we may have some form of entitlement, like spoiled children, that has made us weaker"
An alternative way to look at it is that the people of the past were subjected to massive unprocessed trauma at every age, and that made them weaker than us.
Who’s weak and who’s strong in this scenario: a bloody body is presented following a tragic car accident. The body is maimed, broken, but ultimately salvageable.
One person sees the body and shrieks in horror and goes into a fit of panic.
Another (an ER doctor) is cool as a cucumber from years of desensitization, calmly treats and saves the body.
I’d have a hard time describing the ER doctor as “weaker”. They’re unquestionable more capable and useful. And I propose stronger not weaker.
Strength is subjective, especially if your definition is “capability”. That ER doctor may be so desensitized that they are incapable of providing emotional support, and the one who ran may be a therapist who can provide the individual in the car crash emotional support. So in the end both are strong, simply in different ways.
