People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.
Interpretation
Losing a child fundamentally alters a parent's emotional landscape, creating an incomprehensible void that affects their very being.
This quote by Michael Robotham highlights the profound and unique grief experienced by parents who lose a child. It suggests that such a loss is so extreme that it challenges the natural order of life, making it difficult for parents to cope with the aftermath. The metaphor of a 'huge, black, bottomless hole' vividly conveys the deep despair and hopelessness that encompasses their experience, illustrating that losing a child is unlike any other loss.
In practice
You could use this quote at a memorial service for a parent who has lost a child.
One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude get stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
We are as pieces of chess engaged in victory and defeat!
When you grow up in abject poverty, you see people exactly the way they are.
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
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