There is a saying, though few have probably heard it, that expresses an oversight of the English language — a missing word to describe a pain and a grief that should never be: “a wife who loses a husband is a widow; a child who loses a parent is an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child.” As malleable and ever-changing as our language is, why is there no word for us? The tragedy of a child’s death is nothing new — too many parents throughout time have buried their babies, their toddlers, their teenagers, their adult children years before their own deaths. Since Nicolas died, it seems I hear about a mother who has just buried her child almost daily — not because these deaths are happening more often but because I pay attention now, having survived my own son. It is a commonly agreed upon truth in our society that no death is as tragic as a child’s, no grief as deep as a parent’s. So, again, why is there no word for us?

A child who precedes her parents to the grave goes against the natural order of things — it shatters our illusions of what is fair and what is right. A baby should not lose his life before his first breath. The young should not die before the old. I struggled with these truths for a long time after Nicolas died, struggled with the knowledge that I had already received the gift of three decades of life — thirty years of sunrises and sunsets, holidays with my family, swimming in a cool river on a hot day, traveling to new places, experiencing first and second and third loves — while my infant son received nothing. It is not natural, it is not fair, it is not right. Is this the reason there is no word for us — because burying a child is so unnatural, so appalling, that we cannot name it?

In an interesting article to mark Memorial Day, journalist Karla Holloway attempts to name our grief, to name the unspeakable loss of a child. After losing her child, Holloway searches the world’s languages and settles on a Sanskrit word, “vilomah,” which means “against the natural order.” While “vilomah” may never catch on, it would give some comfort to have our grief, our loss, openly named.

Parents deserve word to convey loss of a child

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