The death of a child. Nothing can prepare us for such a task. We can imagine in our minds what it must be like, but we cannot know until we have been there the emptiness and the pain.

Joe Bayly wrote about the death of the young from firsthand experience. He and his wife lost three children: one at eighteen days, after surgery; another at five years, with leukemia; the third at eighteen years, after a sledding accident complicated by mild hemophilia. Joe said, "Of all deaths, that of a child is most unnatural and hardest to bear." He did not underestimate the grief of parents. He added, "When a child dies, part of the parents is buried." (1)

Such tragedies occur in presidential mansions as well as in average homes like ours.

The former president of France, Charles de Gaulle, was a man o…