When I hear people talk about how much losing their parent In their adult years fundamentally altered their relationship with humanity, with existence, their values, their priorities, I find myself thinking about how children who lose their parents early do not get the chance to grieve without said grief hijacking their entire development and more often than not deciding how they interact with life, I lost my father at 2, and that is my earliest memory in life, grief snapped me AWAKE as a baby, but in a world where children are not seen as fully human, the grief of the adults around you takes center stage, People act like the weight of loss is something a child cannot feel, meanwhile the child’s inability to process those emotions is interpreted as “acting out” or “being difficult”, If grief alters your entire worldview as an adult, it means that when a child knows grief that inevitably becomes the foundation of their entire life, they never even get the chance to form a worldview that isn’t rooted in existential angst.