How Far Have You Wandered?: On the Death of a Child
The 18th-century Japanese poet Fukuda Chiyo-ni once wrote a simple, aching haiku:
My dragonfly catcher,
How far have you wandered—
Have you gone?
There are moments in life when a person finds themselves in a place so dark that words can hardly reach it. Losing someone we love—especially a child—creates a depth of pain most of us can scarcely imagine. It is a shadowed valley that feels impossible to comprehend from the outside, and unbearable to inhabit from within.
Chiyo-ni eventually became a nun, perhaps searching for meaning, perhaps seeking a way to live alongside the grief that reshaped her life. Death is something we struggle to understand because it feels so wrong, so unnatural to the heart. And so we spend our remaining days wondering, reaching, hoping, praying—trying to make sense of what has been taken, and trying to hold on to whatever light we can find.
“For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.”
1 Corinthians 15:21 (BSB)
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