a bereft

I was asked by a subscriber to this blog if there was a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have widow for the woman who has lost a husband, and widower for the husband who has lost a wife, and orphan for the child who has lost their parents, but nothing, it seems, for the parent who has lost a child.  There are other languages which provide this word. For example, Hebrew has a set of words: shkol for the death of a child, shakulim for the parents whose child has died,  and shakula describing the family in which this has occurred.

English has no single word but obviously can express the concept.  Usually we talk about a bereaved parent, a bereaved mother, a bereaved father.  Frequency of use has dulled the strength of bereaved , a word which goes back to Old English where it was formed with the prefix be- and the verb rafian to rob or plunder.  Originally it related to material possessions but by the 1600s it was connected with immaterial things such as life or hope.  It was quite a powerful idea to consider the bereaved person as one who had been robbed and dispossessed of a child.  I cannot think of any other expression that covers this.

So this has left the field open for people to come up with a single word.  One suggestion is to make use of Latin and adopt orbus meaning ‘parentless’ or ‘childless’ to coin a new word in English.  Orbus has a verb orbare which has a past tense orbatus which could be applied to the father, orbata to the mother. Or we can have just one word orbatan by applying an English noun suffix -an to the Latin word.

A rival candidate is vilomah, a borrowing from Sanskrit with the meaning of ‘against the natural order’. It is related to widow. This was suggested  in 2009 by an English professor from Duke University who had recently lost her son and who found herself in this situation where she couldn’t describe her state.

Closer to home there is the suggestion that we make use of the much less common variant of bereaved which is bereft. This is an adjective but English has no problem with turning adjectives into nouns, so we could speak of a bereft meaning ‘a bereaved person’.  This seems simpler than borrowing Sanskrit or Latin words.

So there is an awareness of the problem.  It remains to be seen which, if any, solution takes.