Every Parent Grieves

Michael Gloss, a twenty-one year old American, was reported killed fighting for Russia in its war on Ukraine. This is news primarily because Gloss is the son of a relatively high-ranking official with the CIA.

In his obituary, his parents noted his love for "JRR Tolkien and his depiction of fellowship among heroes", and described him as "forging his own hero’s journey" when he was killed in "Eastern Europe."

It's easy to make fun of this. And Gloss' "journey", which took the form of a particular virulent type of anti-American tankie-ism that saw him volunteering to fight for a reactionary imperialist invasion of a democratic nation, is repellant to me.

But perhaps it's a function of being a parent, but I cannot fault any parent for how they grieve their child. When I saw that obituary, all I could think of was how Gloss was twenty-one years old, which meant that his fascination with J.R.R. Tolkien probably began only five or ten years ago. Twenty-one is an adult, but it wasn't that long ago he was a child, and no doubt his parents still vividly see him as a bright-eyed adolescent jabbering about orcs and hobbits and wizards and Gollum.

This doesn't mean he wasn't an adult now, or that he shouldn't be judged for his choices. Many other people, and from far less advantaged backgrounds, have judged as severely or more for the choices they've made at similar ages. 

But if anything that makes it worse for those who are grieving him; knowing that in some way the rest of the world cannot join them in their grief. Like all parents, I have a persistent background fear of someone hurting my baby; of something terrible happening to him. But I also have nightmares of him growing up to hurt others, of him being in a position where something terrible would happen to him and in the eyes of the world it being warranted. What a horrible, helpless, lonesome feeling that must be.

Everyone is someone's child. The victims are someone's child and the perpetrators are someone's child. I read today about a nineteen-year old man arrested in Berkeley for attempted murder after stabbing someone during a fight outside a bar (as it happens, a bar I periodically frequented). When I read that, I was hit with a wave of despondency -- in part over the senseless of the stabbing, but in part as a sort of third-party grief on behalf of his parents. Didn't he know he had people who loved him? Didn't he realize how much him doing this would hurt them? How awful they must feel, and how alone, given that (understandably, and reasonably) the bulk of the community's care and concern will be directed at the victim and his family, not the perpetrator.

Does this mean that people who stab others should be let off without consequence? Of course not. But I can't expect the parents to abstain from fully grieving a child who is (or is practically) lost to him.