Vilomah: The Tragic Word for Parents Whose Children Have Died

Grief is a universal experience. It’s a subject discussed in whispers and hushed tones around the world. It’s a complex kind of emptiness, incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it, and in many ways, we try to make sense of this loss through words. 

People who have lost their parents are labeled “orphans.” Those who have lost their spouses are called “widows” or “widowers.” In its transformative power, grief carves these labels into people's identities. 

But there’s one state of grief that’s so tragic, so unimaginable, that not even the English language can pin down a word to define it: that of a parent losing a child. It's almost as if, burdened by its weight, humanity seems to have collectively avoided the task of naming parents whose children die before them. Not even the Virgin Mary could define the unthinkable circumstance she found herself in. There’s no word for the inconsolable mother whose arms had to cradle the lifeless body of her son.

In 2009, Duke Professor Karla Halloway set out to fill this absence, to find a word for the new status she now has to live with for the rest of her life. She leafed through letters, emails, and photographs sent to her by parents whose children have died, but found nothing that she could identify with. Until she came across:

Vilomah (n.) a parent who has lost their child to death

Vilomahed (v.) become a vilomah; lose one’s child through death

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Just like the term “widow,” “vilomah” is borrowed from Sanskrit and literally means “against a natural order.” For there’s nothing more unnatural than a parent without a child. Halloway, in an opinion piece for Duke Today, reflects on a Chinese saying that says the gray-haired should not bury the black-haired. Kids bury their parents every day, but it should never be the other way around.

It may take a while for vilomah to catch on. In fact, even in 2023, 14 years after Halloway’s piece, the word still hasn’t been recognized by Oxford Languages, nor has it been included in Google’s dictionary. In 2018, a petition was started by Our Missing Peace, a small UK-based charity working to support bereaved parents, to get vilomah into the dictionary. Almost five years have passed, but the movement has only reached a little more than half of its target goal of 5,000 signatures.  

Author and Journalist Jeffrey Zaslow also commented on the inadequacies of language, noting that there are more gaps where different types of grief should be. He eloquently said: 

“The English language has about 450,000 commonly used words, but more may be needed. What do you call someone who has lost a sibling or had a miscarriage? Or a gay person whose partner has died? Or an elderly person who has lost every friend and relative? So many heartaches can’t be found in the dictionary.”

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Words, even labels, hold power. They shape our identities, how people view us, and perhaps even how we view ourselves. In times of grief, however, words like vilomah and widow can help connect people to a community so they don’t feel utterly isolated in their grief. 

The integration of vilomah into our vocabularies might just be the thing that helps people deal with this level of loss. How long does a bereaved parent pause, for instance, to think of an answer when someone inelegantly asks “Do you have any children?” or “How many children do you have?” How do they articulate the idea that they may have lost a child, but they will always be that child’s parent because that kind of bond is eternal? How do they explain that they are childless parents? 

Now, they have this term. As Halloway said, 

“The difference between today's grief and tomorrow's is that now there is a name. Vilomah. A parent whose child has died.”