It’s fitting that one of the most important things you can do as a parent would require you to think about a thing that’s very nearly impossible for a parent to even consider. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus: As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped? Of course, this is not an easy thing to do. It goes against all our impulses. But we must do it. Because life is fleeting and the world is cruel. Marcus lost eight children. Eight! Seneca, we gather, lost one early too. It should never happen, but it does. It heartbreakingly, world-wreckingly, nobody-deserves-it does. And it’s not that we hope Marcus Aurelius’s and Seneca’s philosophical training prepared them for the pain of losing a child (nothing can prepare you for that). What we hope is that this exercise meant they didn’t waste a single second of the time they did get with their beautiful children.
A parent who faces the fact that they can lose a child at any moment is a parent who is present. They don’t rush through bedtime. They see it as the gift that it is. They don’t hold on to stupid things. A great parent looks at the cruel world and says, “I know what you can do to my family in the future, but for the moment you’ve spared me. I will not take that for granted.”