The worst tragedy...

...is not that the English just voted to leave the European Union. (Although that is pretty awful). 

The worst human tragedy is, as my high school literature teacher had taught me, losing one's child.  

My teacher was an imposing woman: androgynous (not in a sexy way) with wispy short hair, a cross-eyed chain-smoker and demanding lover of books who scared us to death with her long, dramatic Snape-like pauses taken just before humiliating one student or another for not answering her questions correctly. She didn't have any children herself, only a few cats she doted on. But the passion with which she talked of Antigone and why losing a child was qualitatively worse than losing a parent or a sibling stayed with me. Lose a parent or a sibling - you lose your past. Lose a child - you lose the future, she said.

The first time I was touched by death in a real way was in 1993. My father's close friend, the amazing Ottilia had a car accident and her 15-year-old son, Mate, whom I had known all my life and was just a couple of years younger than me died. I remember my mother picked up the phone and came into my room crying, hardly able to speak, telling me what happened. I didn't cry, I couldn't truly process it. I was politically active in Fidesz then and promised to take the then German President, Richard von Weizsacker's, nephew out on the town after a fancy dinner hosted at the Gundel by a young Viktor Orban. (Viktor and I have both seen better days, clearly, especially him...).

The days and weeks after, I did cry. I kept imaging the accident over and over again and tried to undo it by way of magical thinking. Ottilia never spoke of Mate or what had happened. She was ill in the aftermath of the accident. Once, three or so years after the loss of her child, she came to our house and I remember sitting with her and my mother at the kitchen table. My mother had also become ill with cancer by then and I was witnessing something between the two women I wasn't part of; an unexpressed understanding of pain and impending death. But Ottilia's was different: more resigned, more accepting, more ready to give up. I remember wanting to ask how she managed to stay alive after her son died, but I didn't say anything.  In 1997, six months apart, they both died.

Now I am a mother. For over ten years, I've been crying much more easily at the thought of anything that would take away my child's future. When I was pregnant, I cried inconsolably (and embarrassingly) on the subway all the way to work because of an Elizabeth Kolbert article about the death of the oceans. Once he was born, every illness, accident or horror that happened to a child would send me into a (sometimes overly intense) empathy frenzy. That would keep it from happening to him (and me). More magical thinking, I suppose.

I still don't understand how you can survive the loss of a child. As the mother of an only child, I am particularly curious as to what women who lose their only child do. My father's friend whose young boy killed himself by accident medicated herself with pills, alcohol and cigarettes into near oblivion. Another friend of my parents, after losing her twenty-something daughter to a senseless and unsolved killing in Russia, engaged in the manic and unsuccessful investigation of her death (and pills and alcohol). And today, thanks to Facebook, I peered into the emotions of a woman I don't know who unexpectedly lost her 25-year-old only daughter (the girlfriend of an old friend) to a quick and random infection. As I imagine I would, she said she wouldn't stick around on this Earth after losing her "one true friend and precious love".

In the end, what do you do when you lose the future? And how long can you do it for?