Gifts of Passage by Amy Hollingsworth

Author:Amy Hollingsworth [Hollingsworth, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

I wonder, as I read of Elisha’s request and his invocation of inheritance law, what happens when you’ve lost your firstborn son and there are no other children to inherit your wealth or your spirit. You begin to wonder such things after your close friend loses her only child.

Perhaps the law works backward; instead of giving twice as much, twice as much is taken from you. If the deaths are reversed (child first, parent second), maybe the law is reversed as well. It’s unnatural, a disruption in the expected order of things, to lose a child. If the child is an only child, there is a double blow, a sword that cuts twice as deep, a bargain that demands two pounds of flesh—because you can’t be a mother without a child. Jean’s husband, Ed, had grown children, not that his devastation in losing Matthew was any less. But he was, at least, still a father. Jean was different. “There was a mother; a mother once: among the weeping train,” wrote Charles Dickens as he watched the funeral procession of a child.3 Because Ed was much older than Jean, she had also lost the provision for her future, a son to take care of her in old age. Who was going to provide a home for her? It isn’t a singlevictim accident when neither mother nor son survives the crushing weight of an automobile that can’t stop in time.

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