David L. Ulin Regards Books That Explore the 'Unthinkable' Loss of a Child

At the Yale Review, David L. Ulin explores the somber literary subgenre that articulates the loss, or fear of losing a child. From When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back by Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, to Edward Hirsch's Gabriel, Ulin considers books of poetry and prose, asking "How do we reckon with a terror we are hesitant even to name?" From there:

I don’t want to make the argument that discussing the death of a child is taboo, exactly; throughout human history, dead offspring have been an unavoidable currency of life. In Elizabethan England, as an example, 60 percent of children died before they turned sixteen. All the same, we no longer live in the sixteenth century, and in any case, such percentages have nothing to do with grief. Much like love, sorrow remains a private matter, a condition we have no choice but to face on its own terms. “It occurs to me,” Marisa Silver writes, “that a child is something that gets stolen bit by bit. A two-­year-­old dissolves into a five-­year-­old, and no picture can adequately bring back the feel of him, the sound of his voice, and all the intangible qualities that made him himself at that moment. A ten-­year-­old becomes fifteen, then seventeen. Then he slips out of your life altogether.” Even in the best of circumstances, in other words, we raise our children so they can move on. Here we see one reason I avoided works involving dead or dying children: perhaps by refusing to acknowledge such a possibility, I might also deflect the small daily erasures of parenthood, of family—or hold them in their place. Please, please, let me keep them: for me, these are the emotional stakes of raising kids.

As to why this is, in part it is my weakness. In part it is the certainty that I would be incapacitated by the claustrophobia of grief. “My brain burns,” Naja Marie Aidt mourns in When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back; “it cannot get these extreme opposites to fit together; it cannot get this information to form a sequence, one story, the story we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.” The author is referring to the death of her son Carl Emil, who jumped from a fifth-­story window while high on psilocybin; he was twenty-­five. My son—the child I was once so worried I might alienate—is also twenty-­five now, and when he was nineteen and twenty and twenty-­one and twenty-­two we almost lost him: not at once but incrementally, and in a variety of ways. If I decline to go into the particulars, chalk it up to my protective impulse. Or maybe, inasmuch as he remains among the living, his is not my story to tell. Aidt, on the other hand, is not so fortunate; her child can no longer speak for himself. Nor, however, is she able to speak for him, which fuels the tension at the center of her book. “So strange that you don’t exist,” she writes; “I still feel you.… My body still can’t understand that you don’t exist.” The lament is that of any parent who has undergone (or even contemplated) the unthinkable separation death represents.

Continue reading at Yale Review.