This is true. One factor is that when one's father has died, his memory is usually honored. There's his picture on the mantel, there are the snapshots in the family album; and the mother will say things like,
--"You've got perfect pitch, just like your father"
--"Oh, I wish your father could have been here for your graduation"
--"Your dad had a wild, wacky sense of humor, just like yours"
--"Your dad always said ..."
--"Your dad's wuld be so proud..."
--"He was the best husband, the kindest man..."
In other words, though he's passed on, he still has a role: he "lives on," so to speak, and gives the child a sense of identity and continuity. A religious child knows that his deceased father still knows him, loves him, and prays for him in heaven; and amazingly, even non-religious kids can have this sense of being accompanied or cared-for by the father who died years before.
I agree: being fatherless from tragic death can actually be less traumatic than being fatherless from abandonment, artificial insemination, etc.
Something about love eternal.
The flip side:
No one tells you,
"You're gonna' be a drunk, just like your father."
(Just kidding!!!!)
Excellent point. This is a vital difference between deliberate fatherlessness, in which the father is a complete void, and the untimely loss of a father. The orphaned child is still completed by his/her knowledge of the father.
Besides all the eloquent points you made about a dead father versus an absent one, there is usually the attachment of grandparents to their orphaned grandchild, plus various aunts uncles and cousins - all of which are missing from the self-made baby's life.
Beautifully said.
And children who were abandoned by their father (what to speak of anonymous sperm donors) know that somewhere, out in the world, is a father who could give a **** about them. I know several children like that - it is a wound that is not easy to heal.