This is not how it’s supposed to be!

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Wednesday in the week of Proper 15, Year 1 (Pentecost 12, 2015)

2 Samuel 18:33 ~ The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

This verse reports King David’s reaction on learning of the death of his son Absalom. Even though Absalom has rebelled, even though there is “bad blood” between father and son, even though David has every reason to be bitterly disappointed in his offspring and, perhaps, even to rejoice at the end of a threat to his throne, the bond between parent and child, severed by the death of the child, leads to his outpouring of deep sorrow.

“This is not how it’s supposed to be,” is how one parent mourning the loss of her first-born put it. That was my mother speaking about the death of my older brother from brain cancer. She knew well that pain of parental loss; my father also died (in an automobile accident) before his parents and my mother had stood by my grandparents as they mourned their son. (My grandparents experienced that loss again when my uncle, my brother’s only sibling, died of cancer several years later.)

This is not how it’s supposed to be! And, yet, it is again and again and again. I am almost 63 years old; for 59 of my years my country has had troops on battlefields somewhere in the world. (Earlier this year, the Washingtons Blog website detailed the 222 years America has been at war.) Hundreds of thousands of young men and women, and children, uniformed soldiers and civilians, had been killed in those conflicts; numerous children have predeceased their parents. Again and again, fathers and mothers have echoed David’s lament: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

This is not how it’s supposed to be!