LOSS OF A SON

If you look up a list of expected losses in older age you will find the following: loss of health, loss of parents, loss of career, loss of independence, loss of purpose, loss of friends, loss of spouse, loss of siblings and ultimately, loss of your own life. So far, so predictable. What is not on that list is the loss of one of your own children.

I’d heard of one or two people who died in their 50s from cancer or a heart attack, no-one very close. At the time I didn’t make the connection that if their parents were alive, they would be experiencing the trauma and grief of losing an adult child at a time when they themselves were becoming more frail. I now know of 4 lots of parents in their 70s and 80s to whom this has happened over the last eighteen months. All the deaths were of sons.

Late in 2022 a friend in her 70s lost her eldest son to a heart attack. This mother’s grief and anguish, whilst dissipated by early numbness, conveyed itself with a force that disorientated and silenced me. She continued to function, took part in arranging his funeral, and managed to look after her husband with dementia, all whilst in deep shock. The initial fog of early loss has now given way to longing and bewilderment, and a revisiting of all the circumstances of her son’s death, trying to make sense of it.

Only three months later, I have heard of two more deaths of sons. A 51-year-old who has died of a Covid-related illness, leaving a grieving father, estranged wife and three children; also a neighbour is in palliative care for cancer, aged 54, his parents at his hospital bedside. A slightly different death, that of a shopkeeper in my street aged 45, was killed in the recent earthquake in Turkey. It would be ridiculous to say that I am getting used to this, but it has made me wonder whether a death in our 50’s is more common than I’d ever thought.

Thankfully, it is still the case that deaths between 50 and 60 years of age in the UK remain a small proportion of overall statistics, but the figure is higher for men.

I already knew that men were expected to die earlier than women in old age. What I didn’t know is that, in every generation, there are more male deaths than female. This is true for the US as well as the UK. The latest figures from The King’s Fund (2022):

“Females have always lived longer than males, but the gender gap in 1841 (2 years) was relatively small because of the high prevalence in the 19th century of diseases that killed both sexes indiscriminately. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the gender gap in life expectancy started to widen, peaking at 6.3 years by 1971. Reasons for the widening gender gap included poor working conditions and smoking among males in contrast to improved life chances for females, for example, lower risk of dying in childbirth and from tuberculosis, which affected women more than men.

The gender gap narrowed from the 1970s, to 3.7 years in 2019, with mortality falling faster in males than females because of decreases in smoking and mortality from cardiovascular diseases. However, in 2020 and 2021 the gender gap widened to 4 years because mortality rates from Covid-19 were higher in males than females.”

I looked specifically at the leading cause of death in men now in their 50s – it is Ischaemic Heart Disease (IHD), three times that for women at this age (Office of National Statistics, 2001 – 2018). The most common cause of death for women currently in their 50s is lung cancer - I had thought it would be breast cancer. It used to be, right up to 2018, but better treatments for breast cancer plus the delayed effects of early smoking are now making diseases of the lung more common in women. The overall number of deaths from heart disease and strokes continues to decline but we end up with dementia: women more than men.

I think of myself as a good listener but I am almost at a loss as to how to be with parents who have experienced the death a child – for a ‘child’ they remain. The grieving parent in his 80s exhibits an utter world-weariness: I suspect, without his saying it, that he longs to join his son. The grieving mother in her 70s says that she has recommitted to life through helping to look after her son’s children. Both have the bearing of people who have lived too long, want no more heart-break, but must go on living.

I am sure that there are lots of unintended consequences of living longer and this is just one of them – the possibility that your child will die before you do. As most of us like to imagine a gentle slide into our own old age and eventual death, perhaps we need to think more carefully about whether living longer is what we really want. Cowardly though it might be I, for one, would rather die early than have to face the nightmare of losing a child and living the remainder of my life with that bereavement.