Shakul (the state of being a parent who has lost a child)

Shakul (the state of being a parent who has lost a child) names a bereavement that the novel treats as more than the fact of a death: it is a changed identity, bound to the parent's painful sense of having failed to protect. Marco becomes shakul after Adele's death, joining Marina in a condition that brings the estranged former spouses back into contact. The term gives a name to their loss, but not a way out of it; the novel places its meaning in what the surviving parent must carry, and in the care that can still be given to the living.

Meaning and Language

The novel pauses over the scarcity of a settled word for a parent whose child has died. It gives the Hebrew shakul, from a verb meaning to lose a child, alongside the Arabic thaakil, described as having the same root, and the Sanskrit vilomah, glossed as being contrary to the natural order. It also mentions charokammenos in modern Greek, a word for someone wounded by mourning that is used especially for a parent who has lost a child. The range of terms makes the experience legible across languages without making it ordinary: one word points to loss, another to an inversion of the expected order, and another to a wound of grief.

The passage distinguishes losing someone through death from the particular responsibility a bereaved parent may feel. The first-person grammar of loss can seem almost obscene when applied to another person's death, the narrative observes, yet a child's death can make that grammar feel painfully apt to the parent. The parent may believe that protection was a duty and that something should have been prevented, foreseen, or averted. Shakul thus names both bereavement and the burden of imagined responsibility; it does not establish that the parent caused the death.

Before the Name Applies to Marco

Marco's later bereavement follows an earlier family catastrophe: Irene's death had taken years to alter the family's ability to live and breathe normally, and some members never recovered. Adele dies thirty-one years later, when the family nucleus is already fractured. Probo and Letizia's ashes have been scattered in the central Tyrrhenian Sea, and Marco and Giacomo cannot speak to each other. The narrative contrasts the scale of the two losses while refusing to make Adele's death less grave: it seems less destructive to the family because Marco alone bears its immediate consequences and, unlike the family after Irene's death, he alone continues to resist the loss of his child.

That resistance is not self-sufficiency. Dr. Carradori, Marina's former psychoanalyst and Marco's friend, intervenes after Adele's death with two practical gestures that help Marco remain standing and continue a life he did not want. The novel's account of shakul emerges in this vulnerable interval, as Marco is trying to care for Miraijin while confronting the loss of Adele. It is a state imposed by bereavement, not one he chooses or resolves through a single insight.

Shared Bereavement and Continuing Care

Carradori's first gesture is to tell Marina, his former patient, about Adele's death. He travels to the clinic in Upper Bavaria where she is hospitalized. In delivering the news, he helps recover the trust he once had with her and reaches her despite the illness that has left her apparently indifferent to stimuli. His intervention allows mutual pity to take precedence over other feelings among the survivors and helps Marina and Marco find a relationship that had disappeared after their separation.

In the name of their granddaughter, Marco and Marina begin seeing one another again. Marco travels with Miraijin to Germany, visits Marina at the clinic, and stays with the two of them and Greta, Marina's other daughter. At times he takes them for walks in a nearby park. He no longer feels hostility toward Marina; what remains is pity for the narrow life she is living and for the shakul status they now share. The shared term marks a new connection between former spouses, not a restoration of their marriage: their renewed contact is organized around Miraijin and the mutual loss of Adele.

The novel describes Marco's care for Miraijin as a task passed to him by a kind of inheritance. While Adele was alive, she had tried to give her daughter stability, and Marco had stayed with Miraijin when Adele needed to recharge in nature. After Adele's death, he continues that work in her place. The child also becomes the immediate reason he cannot surrender entirely to grief: at two years old, Miraijin is present with him as he struggles to go on. The narrative does not claim that caring for her cancels the loss. Rather, it shows the responsibility of caring for the living existing alongside the identity of the bereaved parent.

Grief, Responsibility, and the Limits of Rescue

The account of shakul turns on the painful implication of parental duty. When a child dies, the parent may feel responsible for what was not prevented or anticipated, and the words for bereavement give voice to that sense of having failed to protect. Marco's story makes the force of this feeling clear without establishing that he caused Adele's death. The distinction matters: the novel presents self-reproach as part of the bereaved parent's experience, not as proof of blame.

The condition also connects Marco's private loss to Irene's earlier death and to the family's inability to remain intact after it. His experience is therefore neither isolated from the family's history nor identical to the earlier grief. By the time Adele dies, the family has already broken apart; the tragedy brings Marco and Marina into a fragile renewed relationship, while his care for Miraijin supplies a continuing obligation. Shakul names the wound and the altered identity, but the novel's aftermath attends equally to the work that survives it: visiting, staying, and helping a child retain stability.