An Excuse to Have a Friends Page

In the mountains of PA, where I live, the timber rattlesnakes mate in late summer, kind of mid-July through early September. Depends a bit on the weather and stuff, but basically late summer. 'Tis the season, as it were.

Also, no snakes were harmed in the making of this post. The snakes are fine.

( Below the cut are pictures of snakes. If that's not your deal, don't click through. )

Like widower, widow, that style of thing. There's not a word for when your kid dies. I think there should be, except probably something with more gravitas than kidowed. Like, that's not... not helping, I don't think.

Parents that lose a child are like a lightning-struck tree. They go on but... they're scarred, forever. *sigh* They're not whole, in a way that I think we should have a word to recognize.

I was like Why isn't there a word for this? and then I came to the horrifying realization that there was not really a need for distinguishing the parents to whom this had happened back in the day because it was pretty much ... all of them. Childhood death used to be super common, no less tragic, but super common. Kids died all the time, from all sorts of causes. It's a lot less frequent these days.

( Under the cut is a fairly weighty post about child death, so don't proceed if that's not something you can handle facing or exploring today. )