Compassion Autumn 2022

Autumn 2022 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 14 I’ve heard it said that, in times gone by when so many children died, their parents didn’t grieve in the same way we do now. Almost as though, because it was such a common experience for parents to have to bury their children, it didn’t hurt so much. I’ve always doubted the truth of that and thought I’d look at just a very few of the records those parents have left behind to see what they can tell me. I started by going back 2400 years to ancient Greece and the death by suicide of Haimon, the son of King Creon (king of Thebes), afterwards Sophocles’s wrote:- “Creon was happy once, as I count happiness: victorious in battle, sole governor of the land, fortunate father of children nobly born. And now it has all gone from him! Who can say that a man is still alive when his life’s joy fails? He is a walking dead man.” (from Antigone translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald) This doesn’t sound to me like a society which accepts the death of a child as a common event; rather it sounds like a society which fully understands, and gives voice to, the horror and pain of grieving for a beloved child. I think I can understand how Creon felt and I don’t think his pain was any less than mine. Coming closer to home, and to the present time, William Shakespeare is just about the most well-known Englishman ever and he was also a bereaved father after his son Hamnet died in 1596. Hamnet was about 12 years old when he died and the precise cause of his death isn’t known although it may have been the plague. Shakespeare’s play ‘King John’ was written after Hamnet died and the following passage is thought to be autobiographical. Was it different then?