Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

Losing a child is every parents’ most visceral fear. I came across, again and again, in various biographies of Shakespeare, a lofty and dismissive attitude to Hamnet’s death. He got perhaps two or three entries in the index, and his death was usually wrapped up in statistics about child mortality in the 16th century, as if the implication was that his death was of no particular significance, that it was run-of-the-mill. It made me furious every time I read this! I just refuse to believe that at any point in history, any where in the world, the loss of a child is anything less than catastrophic for the family concerned. With this passage, we are inside the head of a woman who has birthed eight children and buried three of them. She, I don’t think, would have found any of their deaths run-of-the-mill. She would have been branded by the sense of their fragility.