An Invisible Grief: Reconsidering Parental Mourners
A Too-Invisible Grief

Judith de Luce (Miami University of Ohio)

Greek and Latin literary tradition provides a recurring pattern which is one of the most poignant reminders of the vulnerability and loss the Greeks and Romans associated with old age. I refer to the pattern of elders mourning the deaths of their adult children.  In societies with high infant mortality rates, for a child to have survived birth and childhood would have been a considerable accomplishment; for that same child to have made it to adulthood would have been remarkable.  But to have that child die as an adult, before his or her parents, that was heartbreaking indeed. The child's death meant the blighting of promise, the loss of support in one's old age, in some cases the end of the family itself.  Above all such a death violated the conviction that a parent should not outlive a child.

In our own age there are two sets of parental mourners whose grief is often rendered invisible: the grieving parents of the very young and very old parents mourning their adult children. After a preliminary discussion of the invisibility of these kinds of grief, I will reconsider a selection of poetic representations of mourning elders: Priam and Hecuba at Hector’s death (Homer’s Iliad); Hecuba at the fall of Troy (Euripides’ Hecuba, Trojan Women, Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Laertes mourning Odysseus (Homer’s Odyssey), the mother of Euryalus, Evander and Aeneas mourning the death of Pallas (both  in Vergil’s  Aeneid).

These elders share common features: they are often physically frail, and they often experience considerable hardship, perhaps because they have lost a war, perhaps because they are in exile. As with Oedipus, in Oedipus at Colonus, we may well wonder which has the greatest impact on them, age or circumstances. Like Oedipus, they may demonstrate moments of impressive courage and determination.

I conclude by comparing and contrasting the poetic representation with the

terrible loss which an actual Roman father faced. While we must exercise caution in claiming that artistic texts accurately reflect actual ancient lives, the mythology, metaphor, and narrative technique of the literary passages, read in conjunction with Cicero’s letters (Letters to Atticus, xii,  Letters to his Friends, iv), leave us with a consistent image of a particularly painful loss that could be experienced by elders.  This image has considerable relevance for such mourners in our own time.