and show understanding for their feelings. This is illustrated in Sefer H·asidim,
where parents of young children are instructed not to actively display affection
to their children in front of friends whose children have died.^68 This sensitiv-
ity shows the great awareness of death and its sorrows in medieval society. Most
of the sources emphasize the limits society set on this sorrow, suggesting that
overcoming the grief was the greatest difficulty faced by parents. An additional
story in Sefer H·asidimillustrates this:
Once there was a scholar who had a son who was a young man.^69 And his father
taught him Torah, and the son died childless, and the father cried out in his sor-
row: “Joseph, my son, come and study.” And when it was time to eat, he cried: “
Joseph, my son, come and eat.” Once the father woke up early to study and he
cried: “Joseph, my son, come and study,” as he used to call him when he was
alive, and a phantom in the image of his son came and stood next to him. Im-
mediately, he understood that it was not his son but a phantom. He spit on him
and said: “Go, go, impure one from here and run away.” The phantom fled.
Therefore one should not indulge in sorrow too much; rather, one should mourn
as is customary.^70In another story a woman whose son died went insane after his death, and her
sanity was restored by music for “one sings songs to a sorrowful soul” (Prov.
25:20).^71
Contemporary Christian authors also discuss the sorrow parents felt and the
mourning process they went through after the death of a child. They too scold
parents for devoting too much attention to mourning for their children, while
neglecting God and proper worship. For example, the thirteenth-century Do-
minican Thomas Cantimpratanus said that his grandmother had lost her el-
dest son and refused to be comforted until her son appeared to her in a dream.
She saw him walking behind a joyful group of boys, and asked him why he
walked alone and not in their company. Her son replied that he carried a jug
with all of her tears and that the burden of that weight caused him to lag be-
hind. The son instructed her to shed tears for God and to pour her heart out
for the Holy Eucharist or in charity. Other similar examples can be found in
Christian writings, describing parents who were immobilized with grief, until
a local patron or saint came to their aid.^72
These examples demonstrate the grief and sorrow felt after children’s death,
as well as the attempt made by scholars and advisors to turn the feelings of sor-
row into productive ways of worshiping God. In these sources, it is hard to find
any evidence of parents who treat the death of their children unemotionally
and accept such deaths passively. The sources also document equal conster-
nation over the death of girls and boys, and a number of texts specifically men-
tion parents mourning the death of a son or a daughter. In addition, we have
seen no distinction between the grief of mothers and that of fathers over the
death of their children. Many of the sources examined above discussed the