An emperor commissioned a work from the greatest calligrapher in the nation. "Make me something auspicious!" was the brief. The calligrapher thought for a moment, then wrote on a banner:
Parents die. Emperor dies. Children die.
The emperor was outraged. "How is this auspicious? It speaks only of death!" The calligrapher was serene. "Emperor, there is nothing more auspicious than for your deaths to occur in the natural order. Would you have wanted to die before your parents? Would you want your children to die before you?
The lack of word suggests the opposite, that it was extremely common. Indeed, historically, nearly everyone would have lost a young child, and many people would have lost an older child.
Orphans and widows were also important legal categories. Children without a father needed a legal guardian until they turned 18. Married women (at least under British common law) were not separate legal entities from their husbands. So each category needed a defined term. Parents who had lost children were in many cases just "parents", since families were much larger and it was probably the rare large family who had not experienced the death of a young child.
The lack of words suggests the opposite of the opposite: because it was so common (at a societal level), it was so traumatic (at a societal level). So maybe the lack of word suggests it was so traumatic.
Everything is relative and our expectations are set by society and what is common. Today, losing a child is pretty uncommon. 3-4 generations ago if was very common. You expected to have 4-10 children and to lose one or two. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but I think it's incorrect to say it wasn't less traumatic (you expected it, you lost a lower percentage, etc). To quote Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino, "You're geared for it".
It wasn't long ago that children commonly weren't named until they survived two years.
Bureaucratic dehumanization is responsible for reinforcing traumas that cultures had already built ways of dealing with. My grandparents' generation reused the names of their children who didn't survive, but today, few couples would consider that with any name they were forced to write on both a birth and death certificate.
Birth and death certificates aren't even close to a fundamental driving force here. As a society we think differently about it, mostly because we don't expect children to die any more since infant/child mortality has drastically reduced.
I think, unfortunately, it was so common as to not be notable. People had way more kids, and there was much more infant mortality. Still tragic of course.
> I think, unfortunately, it was so common as to not be notable. People had way more kids, and there was much more infant mortality. Still tragic of course.
More common, perhaps, but I'm not so sure about the not notable part. There are plenty of examples of great grief surrounding the loss of a child. An example that comes to mind from my recent reading is Dostoevsky and "The Brothers Karamazov." The author was experiencing grief from the loss of a 3 year old son and the book rings with it.
However much the past is a different country, it is still populated by humans, same as any today.
There's some good poetic value in it, but I don't know if it's actually true. It has more to do with the effect it has for someone's "normal" life cycle, which is why orphan is only applied to children and not adults. And as the sibling comment mentions, it was pretty common in a family of ~5-10 to have at least one child die.
For severely disabled children most parents hope to outlive their kids because they know that nobody will give them a parent's love when they are gone, even with Satya Nadella-level money. There have been some (tragic? bittersweet? I don't know) cases where an aging parent of a disabled child kills the child and then kills themselves to ensure that their kid doesn't get institutionalized after they're gone.
Some people turn to religion, others try to find a purpose for it (cause or charity, see Sandy Hook Promise[1]), and sometimes others don't find a way to go on.
