Keywords

People say sorry when they learn your child is disabled. They say it in the supermarket, at the school gate, in the hospital corridor, and in the consultant’s office. They say it when they first hear the diagnosis, and they say it again years later when they are reminded. It is the most common single-word response to childhood disability in English, and it is almost never examined.

The word arrives from Old English sārig, meaning pained or distressed, which itself derives from sār, a wound. To be sorry was originally to be wounded — not to have caused a wound, but to carry one. The shift from a description of one’s own state to an expression of sympathy for another’s is gradual and begins in the medieval period, but the wound never entirely heals. Modern sorry retains the trace of the speaker’s distress even when it is offered as comfort for the listener’s. When someone says I’m sorry about a disabled child, the word reveals what it conceals: the speaker’s own discomfort, made presentable as compassion.

This is not to question the sincerity of the people who say it. Most are genuinely moved. But the word performs a function that exceeds its intention. By framing disability as something to be sorry about, it converts the child’s existence into a loss in the first seconds of every conversation. The child is alive. The child is present. And the first word the culture reaches for is the word it uses for bereavement.

See also: Acceptance · Bereavement · Brave · Grief · Pity · Tragedy