Parents who have lost a child: shakul

Parents who have lost a child: shakul is the novel’s name for a parent’s bereaved state, introduced when Marco Carrera receives the news of his daughter Adele’s death. The term gives a name to a loss that feels almost impossible to express, while the narrative complicates the idea of having “lost” a child by confronting the parent’s painful sense of responsibility. Marco’s grief is not presented in isolation: it emerges from a family history of rupture and becomes bound to the care he continues to give Adele’s daughter, Miraijin.

Meaning and Vocabulary

The novel introduces shakul as a Hebrew word derived from a verb meaning “to lose a child.” It places the term alongside thaakil in Arabic and vilomah in Sanskrit, which it glosses as being contrary to the natural order. It also mentions the modern Greek charokammenos, a word for someone wounded by mourning that is used especially for a parent who has lost a child. The accumulation of terms conveys both the distinctive nature of parental bereavement and the difficulty of naming it consistently.

These words do more than label sorrow. They make visible a particular position within grief: the parent survives the child and must continue in a world whose expected order has been reversed. By bringing several languages into the same passage, the novel frames the experience as widely recognized yet not reducible to a single equivalent or explanation.

Marco’s Bereavement

The concept becomes immediate when Marco receives the feared phone call on an autumn Sunday afternoon. Adele has died, and the news leaves him feeling that his life has been emptied again. The narration identifies him, within seconds of hearing it, as shakul, thaakil, vilomah, and charokammenos. The sequence makes naming part of the event itself: the words arrive as Marco enters the condition they describe.

The novel links this loss to Marco’s earlier history. He already regarded himself as marked by his sister Irene’s death; Adele’s death deepens that sense of having been singled out by misfortune. Earlier, when Adele was about three, her thread-related disturbance had brought father and daughter into a newly close relationship. Marco briefly understood that the thread connected Adele to him through an exclusive bond and her fear of losing him, but he immediately repressed the insight. That early fear of loss therefore shadows the later bereavement without turning it into a prediction or an explanation of Adele’s death.

Responsibility and the Language of Loss

The novel distinguishes the fact of a death from the parent’s subjective sense of having lost a child. In ordinary speech, the first-person claim that someone has been lost can sound misplaced: the dead person has died, while the survivor remains. Yet the language takes on a terrible logic when a child dies, because the parent may feel responsible for not preventing, foreseeing, or averting the death. The grammar of “I lost my daughter” thus carries an accusation against the self, even where the passage does not establish that the parent caused the death.

This tension connects Marco’s bereavement to the recurring question of parental protection. The thread first appears in Adele’s childhood as her account of an unseen connection behind her back; later, it vanishes when her parents begin to understand her and returns when family life again becomes unsafe and unstable. In retrospect, Marco understands the thread as part of Adele’s way of navigating a troubled family. The novel does not equate that history with the cause of her death; rather, it shows how a parent’s retrospective understanding can sharpen the burden of what could not be protected or changed.

Survival Through Care

The naming of Marco as shakul does not end the narrative at the moment of loss. Miraijin, Adele’s young daughter, is asleep with her head on Marco’s knees when the news comes. She wakes and smiles at him; the narration presents her presence as a reason for him to endure. Her survival gives Marco a continuing responsibility, even as his grief threatens to make continuation seem impossible.

After Adele’s death, Marco takes on the care that Adele had given Miraijin. The family’s earlier history of instability—including Marina’s illness, separation, and Adele’s efforts to find steadiness—forms the background to this inheritance of care. Bereavement therefore changes Marco’s role without cancelling his grief: he remains a father who has lost a child and becomes the guardian who must provide stability for the child she left behind.

Family Rupture and the Aftermath

The novel also shows tragedy altering relationships among the survivors. After Adele’s death, Marco’s physician and friend Carradori tells Marina, his former patient and Adele’s mother, the news at the clinic in Upper Bavaria. The encounter restores trust between Marina and Marco after their separation. They begin to see one another again in Miraijin’s name, and Marco visits Marina at the clinic with the child and Greta.

Carradori’s account of family tragedy offers a frame for this change: a catastrophe may break apart a family that was united, but it can also bring surviving members together when their relationships have already fractured. The novel compares the effect to a stone thrown into water: turbulence can disturb calm water, while in already troubled water it may produce calm. Shakul remains a name for an individual loss, but its consequences move through a family system, reshaping care, contact, and responsibility among those who remain.