* At Naked Pastor, a fantastic list telling us How to be With Those Who Grieve. The summary: Be There, Shut Up, Be Yourself, Don't Stay Long, Get Physical, Listen, Be With Them, Don't Be Shocked, Comfort, Be Practical, Be Patient.
HT: Rebecca Writes
David also lists 10 Things A Friend's Death Taught Me. This list is as good as the last one. I urge everyone to read them both.
* At The Dawn Treader, an "old" post on the tragic death of a 16-year-old who was hit by a drunk driver, with a recent comment at the bottom by a mother who recently lost her only son. She explains what she's found helpful and comforting in the three months since his death.
* At Done With Mirrors, Callimachus reviews Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and notes the "fearful swath of death" that "[cuts] through young families" in 19th-century life stories:
Researchers into early nineteenth century families quickly come to accept the high death rates among children as a fact of life in those days. Families were large, medicine was crude, disease ran rampant, and it seems no family was untouched by the tragedy of a child lost.
He goes on to detail and give a plethora of examples. After one of these he writes:
It's remarkable that a tragedy so pervading, and so intense, has not been more considered by historians in examining the temper of the times. This grim fact of life seems to me to explain so much about the shape of 19th century American minds, especially where they seem different from ours: The determination to make something of oneself, the importance of family....not just the intensity of American religion but the form of it, so full of resurrection and the need to keep in God's good graces at every moment, seems to have been guided by the realities of death in that era. The hope of meeting in another world and knowing one another in the flesh again was the only solace. Lincoln, lacking it, was thrown into despair by the loss of Ann Rutledge.
...Others, faithful, were able to bear the loss by convincing themselves of this theology. Mary Todd, after her child's death, threw herself into the bosom of the Presbyterian church, while Chase, who always was devout, was tormented because his first wife had died without fully affirming her Protestant faith.
Given that, I wonder if it is mere coincidence that the decline in religious intensity among the mass of Americans seems to have begun within a generation of the decline of the child death rate, reversed when medical men and women finally began to understand, and beat back, tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and whooping cough.
Thought-provoking.
HT: Ambivablog
