What To Call a Parent Who Loses a Child

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rosie, and I live in Edmore, Michigan.

Hi, Rosie.

What’s up?

I lost my only son earlier this summer.

Oh, gosh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Thank you, and I was discussing the situation with a friend of mine.

I’m a high school English teacher, and I was talking with another English teacher because we like words and etymology and things like that.

And she had also lost a child, and she said, there is no word in our culture for someone like us.

If you’re a child and you lose your parents, then you’re an orphan.

If you’re married and your spouse dies, then you’re a widow or a widower.

But there is no word in our culture for someone who has lost their child.

And I was wondering if you know if there is a word in our culture or perhaps in another culture.

My friend commented that it is such an unspeakable thing, and that’s why we don’t have a word.

I was wondering if you could find something.

I kind of feel like I’ve lost a little piece of my identity because I’m not a mother anymore.

Right, of course.

Well, you’re a mother, but the person who made you the mother is gone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think in English we do not have a word that acknowledges and respects what you’ve been through.

Not one word.

Not exactly.

Not one word.

There’s a way to say it in two or three words.

Right.

But those may be clunky.

Right.

Right.

Like you could say bereaved mother.

And I think most people would understand, oh, she lost a child.

Right.

Yes.

Right.

But I think the issue of acknowledgement and respect is really important here.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it kind of helped coming to grips with my grief.

Of course.

I mean, if I had a title for it or, you know, like I know, you know, like when someone comes up with a new disease, it sometimes makes it more tangent or, you know, if you can put your hands on it better when it has a name.

Right.

I mean, if you’re, you know, experiencing symptoms and you don’t know what it is, it’s all the more confusing.

But then, oh, it’s this.

It has a name.

Right.

But saying a name to your pain kind of clarifies everything.

Yes.

Right, right.

It’s unspeakable, but it happened to you.

So how do you speak that acknowledgement into existence, I guess?

Without having to explain it at length every single time you talk about your circumstances.

Because you don’t want to hide this event from others, right?

You want them to know what has happened to you.

Yeah.

There is a word in Hebrew, I believe it’s something like shakol, which is found in Hebrew scripture to describe women who have lost children.

And I believe there’s a similar term in Arabic, but I’m not aware of anything in English.

There’s also been a movement, a small movement, to adopt a version of a Sanskrit word, which is something like vilomah.

Vilomah.

V-I-L-O-M-A-H.

It’s a movement started by Carla Holloway at Duke University, a professor there.

But it hasn’t really caught on.

It’s kind of hard to say.

But it does have a nice correspondence to widow, which has some Sanskrit roots way far back.

Although it came to us from Old English.

Having to do with emptiness.

Yeah, right, yeah, and bereavement itself.

Yeah.

But most languages do something where they use an adjective that means bereaved and then the role or title of the person, like bereaved mother, bereaved parent, something like that.

Rosie, is there anything that you’ve thought of to?

No, I say having been an English teacher for many years, I kept thinking, oh, gee, maybe I could go to a Greek root or a Latin root and come up with something and invent a word.

Yeah, that’s really tough.

I mean, I’ve seen people suggest daddo, like D-A-D-D-O-W, like dad and taking the ending of widow.

But that seems so trivializing to me.

Yeah, it seems a little too goofy.

Mamo and daddo.

Mamo and daddo.

But those are such arbitrary sounding words and sort of, I don’t think.

And then you’d have to explain what the word means.

Right, every time, which makes it kind of worse in a way, right?

What’s interesting about widow and widower, they themselves are words that when they are applied to people, they often dislike them anyway, even though they have a word to describe their situation.

So you’ll find many widows who really dislike being called a widow.

And widowers are often scratching their heads like, why this word?

For this circumstance, it doesn’t seem right either.

I think you may never find a term that matches the depth of what you’ve gone through, unfortunately.

Not in this language.

But this is the kind of question that I would really love to throw out to the folks who are listening to see what they have to say.

Other people have had this same experience.

Solid and transparent and not a jokey blend, right?

Yes.

Something with some respect to it.

Not a trendy word.

Exactly.

When you first hear it, you’re like, oh, yeah, of course.

I get it.

That one makes sense.

Yeah.

We may not have it, though.

Yeah.

So if you have what you think is a solution to the question Rosie is asking, a single word in English that would work in English for bereaved parents, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Rosie, you might Google that word vilomah, V-I-L-O-M-A-H, because you’ll find a community of people who are talking about the same thing.

I don’t know that they’ll come up with an appropriate word or not.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, this has been very helpful.

Thank you so much for your call.

Yes.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.