{Death of a Child}[17th February 1971]

[Redbook1:196-197][19710217b]{Death of a Child}[17th February 1971]

17.2.71. [continued]

            I don't quite know why the death of this child from [school], [...], has made such an impression on me.  It must be purely symbolic: simply because I never knew him -- he probably arrived long after I left -- his death seems to have become in some way a temporary focus for my ... my what?  A kind of discontent verging on controlled despair, a profound unhappiness at the misery of the world, combined with my own uncertainties.  And then the fact that he was from [my school] enables me to connect....

            I suppose one can divide one's feelings in the presence of death into three, or perhaps four, categories.  First, there is personal loss, closely connected with what I feel most of all in this case: the loss of [i.e. for] the family concerned.  I could hardly bear to read the obituary notice, and yet I did read it again.  The only son, he was.  One imagines the grief of others and cannot help but feel it to some extent oneself -- oddly, since, as I say, there is for me not the slightest trace of personal loss.  And yet I have felt this deeply.  Why?

            Then there is one's own grief and horror at the thought of what the last few seconds of life were like for the child -- for any child, for anyone; but particularly for a child.  Was the edge vertical, all five hundred feet of it, or did it slope?  Did he die before, when or after he reached the bottom?  And how long -- the crucial point -- and to what degree was he aware between sitting on the ice and his eventual death?

            Lastly, the waste of past and loss of future is bound to distress one, especially in the case of a child's death, and especially at this age: when, nearing the end of unthinking, receptive, reactive existence one is poised upon an age of increasing awareness and contribution.  For all I know this child may have been a little b******, or he may have been the great man of a tomorrow that now will never come, or he may have been both; more likely, he was neither, but just an ordinary small boy, with all that implies; and therein lies the tragedy.

[PostedBlogger19062013]