This search is a little more compelling. It's a toughy. And just tonight, I found "Sophie's World" in the local municipal library and started reading it, and it contained this passage:
The red house was surrounded by a large garden with lots of flowerbeds, fruit bushes, fruit trees of different kinds, a spacious lawn with a glider and a little gazebo that Granddad built for Granny when she lost their first child a few weeks after it was born. The child's name was Marie. On her gravestone were the words: "Little Marie to us came, greeted us, and left again."
That is a very Zen attitude, a good Zen answer, but probably isn't very satisfactory for a question that should be handled seriously and delicately, and there are answers on many levels of Buddhism. Not that I'm speaking for Buddhism or Buddhists, just my own reflections.
The first thing that comes to my mind is to look at the question itself: "Unexpected tragedy" and "loss of a child" (and I'm assuming loss of a child means an infant, as the loss of a child, any child, is a less challenging subject as everyone is someone's child).
The question posits "unexpected tragedy" = "loss of a child", which is fair enough. But it automatically divides the issue into 1) an emotional one (unexpected tragedy), and 2) an objective fact (loss of a child).
If it's a question of making sense of the emotional impact, the tragedy of the loss of a child, then Buddhism has one approach which deals with our own selves and how we deal with our own emotions. There really isn't any sense to be made, only how we handle it among any other hardships and tragedies we naturally and normatively encounter in our (samsaric) human lives.
There are plenty of books by the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh among others, those are just the ones I know, that can help guide people through such hardship. Too often we only think of tragedies when they happen and that they're bad, without considering or facing the possibility during other times that they might happen.
Buddhism teaches to consider the possibility of those things happening as part of the transiency of life and to constantly prepare for them through meditation and contemplation. It even goes so far as to teach that there are always positive perspectives to any situation that we sometimes must search for.
And by "prepare", it can be retroactive. Even if you come to Buddhist teachings after a tragedy, they may still help make sense of it.
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I forget how I fell into a conversation with her, but she told me her story, although I'm sure I'm forgetting details and making other stuff up, but the point is still the same. She told me that when she arrived at Plum Village, she was anything but peaceful. She cried every day, she was a mess. The senior nuns didn't know what to do with her.
She had been a medical student in San Francisco and she had a fiance. During that period, she had made a visit to Plum Village in France and returned gushing about the place. Her fiance told her that if that was a path that she was interested in, she could pursue it. But she was in love and was looking forward to a life with him.
Then one day much later, after she earned her medical degree and license, her fiance went on a day trip down the northern California coast, and while climbing along rocks on the coastline, a wave came up and swept him away.
She was devastated and inconsolable and the only thing she could think of doing was returning to Plum Village. Which she did. And ordained and never left.
There is a lesson for me in her telling me her story, but that's a different story. At the time, I was trying to be delicate about her telling me her personal story, but I wanted to tell her my impression of it and said something along the lines, afraid of saying something offensive, suggesting that it was his sacrifice that led her to become a nun. She smiled at me and knowingly said, "I know".
If you don't know what spiritual love is, if you met this nun, you'd learn.</tangent>
However, if the question is about making sense of the death of a child as an objective fact, then it's more of a metaphysical question and the first idea that comes up for me is karma. I've always wondered about the karma of people who die in infancy or in group disasters like plane crashes.
Contemplating karma is partly about making sense, joining point A to point B. My basic statement on karma is: every moment is a moment of karma manifestation; every moment is a moment of karma creation. This is because that was, that will be because this is. It's not "what comes around goes around".
But what's the sense in the untimely death of an innocent? Someone who hasn't done enough of anything to warrant a "karmic manifestation" of the end of his or her life. Well, that's partly the point. And it's not something anyone can know or be comforted by.
If it's karma, it's from previous lives, something we don't know anything about. Speculative reasons of why a child should die in infancy due to karmic reasons runs in the thousands. All we can do is deal with it in the present tense.
The child had his or her own karma. We have ours. The child died and it hurts like hell, but how we handle ourselves and our own emotions and reactions is also karma. It's not only our own karma, but can influence the child's karma. The effect of the compassion we put out, replacing grief, shouldn't be underestimated. I don't know the effect, but it's a matter of faith.
You lost a child you loved. Don't focus on the lost, but the love.
That's all.
However, I'm still a little intrigued by the wording of the Google search, "unexpected tragedy". What tragedies do we expect? Japan and individual citizens are currently facing a tragedy, was it expected? They expect earthquakes and tsunamis and prepare for them as best as possible. But when it happens, does it matter whether they expected it or not? It's still a tragedy.
And even in our own daily lives we don't know what tragedy might befall us, whether we will receive news of a loved one dying, or dying ourselves. Or an infant child dying. The nature of our human lives has unexpected tragedies assumed.
Whether they manifest or not, Buddhism teaches to prepare for them by looking deeply into the impermanent nature of our human lives. That may not be making sense of it, but rather how to cope.
