A Mother´s Grief

I  cannot think of anything so endlessly tragic as a mother´s grief. No matter where we turn or travel, no matter how well read or ignorant we are, we do universally react to a mother´s grief over the loss of a child. We do not need to be saints, sinners but just ordinary people to react with deep emotion when such grief is being displayed in any cultural or ethnically context and we cannot help ourselves unless we are deeply emotionally disturbed. We respond with sorrow, pity and a deeply rooted compassion for the bereft. We hurt inside with the stricken and for ourselves.

We have all come across the dry facts that the infant deaths  in historical and rural times were  like an unwelcomed rule, not a rare exception,  and still is in a major part of our world and in our times. The number and the fact of the frequency, however, did not lessen the pain.

In the Zeffirelli ”Jesus of Nazareth”  adaptation, the often flamboyant director tunes down the operatic storytelling and by choosing Robert Powell as Jesus and the Argentine born actress Olivia Hussey as Mary he was rewarded with acting of highest possible quality. None of the actors mentioned fully recovered from the experience and their careers came to a stand still.

Hussey´s scene at the cross holding her dead son in her arms and her heart breaking lament is cinema / television history regarded as one of the most impressionable ever caught onscreen. 

While my mother, widowed young and with me as her only child, had good reasons to fear my early death because of health issues I had but one prayer to my Maker. Not because I wanted a long life but that I should outlive my mother to spare her the grief. My prayers were answered. My anguish, fear and worry lessened to a great extent when she passed on with me by her side. 

I do not fear death. I fear what grief and sorrow it causes our beloved surviving ones. We do not know if death is a personal tragedy. But we know we can cause tragedy by dying. Some of us die with guilt since we could do nothing to stop the separation from our children, our spouse, our friends and those who genuinely mattered to us and vice versa.

I cannot even begin to imagine what losing a child means to the parents. A father´s grief is seldom told.

You may be utterly convinced that the historical Mary and her firstborn, Issa, Jesus, were but ordinary people, like you and me. But no matter how we perceive them, we can be touched by and pity their fate. That is the gift of being born a human. We are so sensible to tragedy that we feel the grief of an elephant matriarch loosing her elephant cub and recognize her pain.

That may also be our ultimate hope. We have not become totally dehumanized and prepared to coldly ignore suffering, whether that of our own species, or others.

Just a thought

Easter 2015

Douglas Modig