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SIX I KNOW NOT “SEEMS” Grief for Parents in the Analects Amy Olberding Today, in the contemporary western world at least, the death of a child is counted a special sorrow. The parent who loses a child is judged to have been dealt a blow of greater force than that produced by other species of loss. We imagine the grief of the bereft parent to be sorrow at its most severe, and mourning to be correspondingly prolonged. This assessment, however, must be understood in the context of the historical and sociological conditions from which it issues. We rue the deaths of children as particularly grief-worthy in a context in which infant and childhood mortality rates are their lowest levels in history and birth rates are declining. Children are rarer in our experience, the deaths of children rarer still. Medical technology makes death appear more negotiable in general, and the trust this inspires is perhaps most acute when the ill also have the resilience of youth in their favor. We thus can expect our children’s survival with a confidence our forebears never could. Where we find that trust violated and our confidence misplaced, our grief is increased by shock and dismay. Such responses are additionally magnified by what the child represents to us, the values she embodies. She is innocence and vulnerability, as well as the promise of a future. The material and technological advantages of contemporary life promote a sense of both power and possibility, a forwardlooking optimism that finds its most poignant limit in the loss of the child. Indeed, the death of a child sometimes operates as a trope for the death of innocence itself, and our perceived failure to protect the child reads as 153 154 AMY OLBERDING a profound statement of impotence, an inability to shape the hopeful and open world we prize. In Kongzi’s China, it was not the death of the child but the death of the parent that was marked out for intense sorrow and prolonged mourning.1 To understand the conditions that give rise to this priority, we can begin by observing that the material realities of the time operate against our own popular sentiments. Infant and child mortality rates were such that the majority of those born did not attain adulthood, and this fact alone works against the optimism we invest in our children. In short, life was far more tenuous and death far more familiar. Cultural self-understanding and aspiration are framed accordingly. Where life is more fragile, elders represent persistence and continuity. They embody the ability to carry forward the sustaining traditions and social memory that promote order. The symbolic role of parents is, moreover, particularly acute given the social and political realities of Kongzi’s age, a time in which longstanding values regarding kinship ties and ancestral authority were challenged by increasing political chaos. Insofar as parents represent an authoritative connection to a more ordered age, their deaths render the survivors both bereft of this connection and burdened by a need to assume their own authority in relation to the past. The bereft must, that is, not only relinquish those who guided them, but also become guides for others. To lose a parent is to be cut loose from that which most-immediately moors the individual to the vital and legitimating authority of the past and its sustaining structures; such is a source of potent sorrow. Of course, while there is much more that might be said about these cultural priorities and how societies assign precedence to particular species of loss, here we need only note the general fact that identifying historical and sociological circumstances has considerable explanatory power in assaying cultural concerns regarding bereavement. Undeniably, cultures frame mortality according to underlying value commitments.2 Such commitments are certainly diverse, but they generally issue from a culture’s assessment of what renders life meaningful and correlated perceptions about risks to achieving the best sort of life. Broad values about such matters are in turn informed by the social and material conditions of a time and place, by what sorts of flourishing and achievement seem possible and appealing given the world as we find it and can shape it. In short, although death is universal, how death features in an understanding of the human condition confesses its origin in the local and particular. To paraphrase Derrida, while all people die, they do not die alike.3 Nor, of course, do they grieve alike. Caution is therefore...

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