by Litsa Williams
whatsyourgrief.com

In 1800, nearly half of all children died before age 5.
Let that sink in for a moment.

I remember when I first processed that fact. It was at a Compassionate Friends conference in 2014. A bereaved mom was speaking about the isolation of losing a child. She described years of feeling as though no one understood her grief, calling it a death “out of order.” She lived in a fog of “why me.”

Then, while researching an unrelated topic, she came across childhood mortality data. The discovery stunned her: just over 200 years ago, one in two children died before age 5.

Grieving a child feels isolating and unjust. But seven or eight generations ago, it was more common to lose a child than not. Her head spun as she processed the implications.

Delving deeper in these numbers, she found unexpected solace in connecting her experience to the history of human suffering. For most of human history, parents who had multiple children often endured the death of several before adulthood.

Until the Industrial Revolution, to have children was to face inevitable grief. In an era of NICUs, organ transplants, and vaccinations, it’s nearly impossible to imagine.

Until recently, I always thought about those statistics from the perspective of parents. I imagined the fear that accompanied every pregnancy and the dread any illness or injury must have brought. I envisioned a world where newly bereaved parents were surrounded by others who had walked the same path.

What I hadn’t considered was how that reality must have shaped children (and therefore, everyone). For every child excited about a new sibling, there was a 50% chance of becoming a bereaved sibling with each birth. Losing a cousin, classmate, or friend wouldn’t have been rare. Reaching adolescence without multiple losses of siblings, cousins, and classmates would have been impossible.

Grief, of course, is the pain of losing someone we love. But a significant part of grief is also trying to make sense of something that feels wrong, that violates our beliefs about how life should work.

As Pauline Boss says, “An experience is meaningful when it is comprehensible to the person having the experience.” For millennia, death was painful and devastating, but it was also comprehensible. It was part of life’s template from the very beginning. Life was loss. To live was to lose.

When I was 4, I was going to have a little brother, Christopher. I was excited. Those memories are faint sketches now, but I vividly recall the moment my mother told me Christopher had died and that a baby brother wouldn't be coming home from the hospital. I remember exactly what she wore and where we sat in the house.

We visited Christopher’s grave. Though my parents shielded me from some things, they didn’t hide this loss or the deep grief it brought.

The next death I remember came when I was 7 and she was 36. My friend’s mother, Ms. Barbara, died. Our families were close, and we lived on the same street. We watched her get sick; we were told to be quiet when we were playing while she rested in the bedroom across the hall. I remember sitting on her bed, watching the tiny curls growing back after her chemo. She looked tired. My parents explained she would die.

I don’t know if my parents debated bringing me to the funeral, but I'm glad they let me decide if I wanted to be part of it (long before the internet was around to reassure them that was what they should do). My memory is so clear of standing with my dad, holding his hand in front of her casket, in the same funeral home where he would lie 11 years later. I asked why she looked so yellow, and my dad calmly explained jaundice to 7-year-old me.

The funny thing about being a child is that you don’t know your life is different from anyone else's -- until you do. I thought all kids knew babies and children could die until my mom told me not to mention it to a friend because they might not know, and it could scare them.

When 18-year-old me stood next to my dad’s casket, part of me screamed that it wasn’t fair. But that voice wasn't as loud as I know it is for some teens who lose a parent. Between standing at Ms. Barbara's casket and standing at my dad's, the losses had not stopped. The summer I was 15 a good friend's older brother died from cancer; I fumbled through the darkness, unsure how to support him. Two years later one of my dad's close friends died of brain cancer at 48, leaving behind two daughters around my age. Even though they lived just minutes away, his illness progressed so quickly that we couldn't say goodbye before he changed into someone we no longer recognized.

When my father died, it shattered my world. But it didn’t shatter my understanding of how the world worked.

Life is loss. To live was to lose—that had always felt true.

In my personal and professional life, I’ve been struck by how many people reach adulthood without significant loss. I’m amazed, though not surprised, at how often parents shelter children from death. We seem lucky to live in a world where that is an option.

It makes you wonder, when did medicine advance enough to protect us from death? When did enough funerals move from family homes to funeral homes? When did enough people begin dying hidden away in hospitals and facilities instead of at home?

We’ve celebrated these advancements—and rightly so. Who wouldn’t? Global life expectancy has jumped from age 40 in the year 1800 to age 73.3 in 2024. In 1800, 462 of every 1,000 children died before age 5. In 2020? Seven of every 1,000.

We would all choose these advancements over the alternative. Yet perhaps feeling alone in grief is the price we pay for a world where death is so much rarer than it was for 99.9993% of human history.

Ken Doka’s equation comes to mind:
Change = Loss = Grief

This includes good change. The incredible progress of modern society—longer lives, fewer deaths—has inevitably brought its own kind of loss.

As a society, we’ve lost the foundational understanding that life, at its core, is predicated on loss. To live is also to die. We’ve lost funerals in our homes, signaling to neighbors and communities that we are grieving. We’ve lost the shared experience of loss, the knowledge that our families, friends, and neighbors have almost certainly walked the path of grief early and often. What an immense blessing and also, strange as it is to say, perhaps socially and culturally a loss.

I am not grateful for the losses that shaped my childhood. But I am grateful for the perspective they gave me. I appreciate that I can be present with others in pain. I’m thankful I learned early that the fundamental question of loss isn’t “Why me?” but rather “Why not me?”

I feel, as philosopher Martin Heidegger would put it, a deep obligation to live as a being-toward-death. To acknowledge mortality, to recognize its presence in life. These lessons gave me a perspective I value, though I lament the losses that taught me.

Of course, I would give up all this understanding to bring even one of those people back. But since that isn’t possible, I keep wondering: Did earlier generations build more connection, foster stronger community, and experience less isolation while navigating the pain of grief when death inevitably shaped childhood? Life teaches us that loss is inevitable, and understanding this is key to grasping what it truly means to live. As a society, we may be both incredibly fortunate and significantly diminished by having fewer chances to learn this lesson.

Originally posted at Life is Loss: To Live is to Lose - Whats your Grief