The experience of mourning occurs so often, but it’s treated, studied or discussed so little because faced with dead, everybody recognises her/his limits and has to be reconciled with her/his own fragility. But the death of a son is something that our mind simply can’t admit; it’s unacceptable because it interrupts the continuity of life, it burns out the torch received by previous generations and which has been passed on to her/him hoping that she/he would have been able to keep it burning on her/his turn and to give it to her/his children; it doesn’t exist anything more unnatural and more dramatic than the death of a son, it’s the project of life itself that is struck and put into discussion.
“The death of the young is a failure, the death of old people is the arrival at a port” said Plutarch. And assisting the failure of the own son without succeeding in anything in order to save him is the most terrible and most dreadful pain which can be experienced in one’s life.
And so the family gets isolated, withdrawing into themselves because it seems that nobody knows how to help them: their pain let all feel uncomfortable and so the parents learn that if they hide their real feelings and mood they’ll be accepted in a better way.
The masks they wear in society are going to turn too heavy and when they take it off in their private life nobody recognises the other one, like strangers in the same house, doggedly forbidding the access to whoever wants to come in “out of recitation’s time” protecting themselves from an external world which is seen as a threatening one.
Blaming themselves, sense of guiltiness, anger and resentment lord it in their rooms assaulting each of them in different times and ways, giving rise to reactions which may seem incomprehensible but examining them better, they’re are leading back to a mortal wound.
As a consequence of a prolonged refusal of a too dramatic reality, the questions repeat themselves in a continuous and merciless way: they pursue you everywhere and you feel impotent to avoid them and, even worse, to find an answer to them:
“What have we done to deserve all this?”
“If only I had been able to help him”
“If I could hold him only one more time”
“If only I could say: ”I love you” once more”
“Sorry! I beg your pardon! Sorry!”
Many parents need to keep intact their son’s room: it may seem to them that if they put away his belongings his death will become real. Even if they often have the opportunity to move to another place or to change home, they aren’t able to, because they fear to lose their son in a definitive way thinking he wouldn’t find anybody to welcome him if he “came back home”.
The tragic, sudden death of a son seriously mars the life of the remaining family members. Careers are often interrupted because many adults aren’t able to get back to work for a certain period of time or they don’t yield much when they do it. Marriages drop into crises because the consort may become the object of furious, impatient outbreaks of anger which rise from the anguish and frustration of the loss they suffered. Some of them abandon Church and other places of socialisation and they refuse to speak about what happened creating in this way tensions in their relationships with others. Each family member suffers in solitude and each of them feels hopeless.
It takes patience, hard work and time to recover from the loss of a son. Only if you combine all of these three elements it’ll be possible to get out of mourning. The memories neither will disappear nor they have to, but the intensity of pain will diminish and the spasms of distress will appear less frequently.
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