This morning, listening to the radio, I heard a story about my former student, Nate Krissoff, and his father, Dr. Bill Krissoff.

     Nate was in the Marines and was killed in Iraq on this day last year.  He had graduated from Williams College in 2003 and when he was a senior he had taken my seminar in international relations, "Globalization and War."  Little did I know then that he would be heading off into globalized war and be killed by it…

      Nate’s father, Bill, has thus been faced with the loss of his son.  Death brings questions and introspections that we cannot anticipate in life.  In his case, he looked within and asked himself how he could do something that would honor his son’s life.  And he chose to provide his medical knowledge and skill to the Marine Corps, which his son had been a part of.  At 61, this was not an easy feat, but he has gained the necessary age waivers and is getting ready to set off to Iraq.

      This story had, for me, a Confucian ring to it.  We often think of Confucianism as focusing on the obligations that children owe their parents.  But I have always believed that an equally strong case must  be made for the importance to Confucianism of the obligations parents owe their children.  This is not discussed as much in The Analects as is filial piety, but it is crucial nonetheless.  Perhaps a father’s and mother’s responsibilities to children were just too obvious to Confucius and his followers to have to be discussed explicitly. 

      If we are to take Confucian ethics seriously, however, it must be the case that parents are bound to provide materially for their children, to educate them morally, and to remain for them throughout life a central node in an ever-expanding network of Humanity-creating relationships.  Parents are, and must be, the crux of a child’s social experience.  A parent guides a child as he or she goes out into the world to do good. And a parent’s role in this regard never ends – even, as the Krissoffs show us, when a child pre-deceases a parent.

     When a child dies it is up to parents, and other family members and friends, but especially parents, to express to the world, in actions and/or words, the effects that that child had on the world.  We could simply forget, yet in forgetting we would be losing not only the memory of a loved one, but also an element of our own moral constitution.  In life, the child is a vital part of a parent’s moral experience, and the accumulated products of that experience live in in every action and thought of the parent.  In death, the child remains as a deeply ingrained constituent of the parent, and of all who were a part of the child’s social sphere.  A parent, then, cannot but continue to express to the world the child’s moral effects. 

     Dr. Krissoff makes this evident.  He takes things a step further by seriously asking himself how he might change his daily ritual behavior to best express his son’s moral presence.  And he comes up with a fitting gesture.

     Not all of us need to join the military.  Indeed, Dr. Krissoff did not have to join the military to honor Nate.  There might have been other, equaling fitting avenues.  What is necessary, however, is that we all must ask ourselves how we can best express the moral presence of not only ourselves but our children and other loved ones, even when those loved ones have passed away.  It is the question that is the key; particular responses will vary by personal circumstances.

    My wife often says that she wants to continue to use the gifts that Aidan gave her.  And so, she volunteers and works with several agencies involved with disabled children and adults.  I find my own ways of expressing Aidan to the world.  Dr. Krissoff is a marvelous reminder of this duty all parents owe their children.