Mark Twain lost two children. Robert Frost lost a child. Charles Darwin lost a child. Abraham Lincoln lost two children. Thomas Jefferson lost a child. I think more US Presidents lost children than not. Losing a child 3 days before Christmas, extra pain if possible on top of the seemingly unbearable. Irving Berlin lost a baby on Christmas Day. I think of this every time I hear "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas".
This family's new painful life jopurney is profoundly felt and shared by those of us who walk on the same track.
You are so right. Amazing though, how those griefs often push us to be better than we normally would be. In my case it pushed me into God's arms, and my life became one dedicated to service in His Kingdom. My prayers and my heart goes out to the Dungy family.
I can assure you that the fact that the son died 3 days before Christmas has no bearing on their feelings this Christmas. The pain of the loss is too great and it wipes everything else out of their minds, even Christmas. Next year Christmas will be painful for them, and every Christmas in the future will be tainted with the loss of him.
Mark Twain lost THREE children: A boy at two years of age early in uis marrage, Suzy, his favorite, in her early twenties. Then his youngest daughter on IIRC Christmas eve 1909--her name escapes me also.
He wrote very movingly of the last daughters death in his autobiography. He ended the book with it. If you read it you will never forget and forever see the hearse as Twain saw it that day from the window of his home in Conneticut, vanishing slowly, softly, in to the swirling falling snow.
Twain comes pretty damn close to finding words to describe what a person feels at such a time and transmitting the sense to others.