Outliving One's Offspring

"No parent should bury their child", some say.

Well, sometimes that cannot be avoided. Everyone is liable to die, and while it's more likely that parents will die before their children, sometimes the opposite happens: a father, a mother, a Parental Substitute, etc. will be unable to stop the death of their son, daughter, ward, etc. and then will have to deal with the consequences.

The reasons, logically, can vary. At times, the "child" figure can succumb to illness. At others, they're done in by other living beings (humans, animals, aliens, etc.) in different circumstances. At others, they do themselves in. The key here is that this does NOT happen thanks to the parents' actions: either someone/something else does the younger person in. And the parents' reactions can vary as well, from depression to Despair Event Horizon crossing, to seeking Revenge against anyone who took the child away forever, etc.

Compare Offing the Offspring, where the parental figure is the one who does the child one in. Can be potentially worse for The Ageless (if they have or adopt kids).

Logically, it's Truth in Television and an Awful Truth that all parents can potentially face at one or another point.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Outliving One's Offspring include:

Anime and Manga

• Astro Boy's whole plot is kicked off when Dr. Tenma's son Tobio dies in an accident and he creates Astro as a Replacement Goldfish.
• In the Cutey Honey first anime, Dr. Kisaragi used his dead daughter's image as a basis for Honey herself. Unlike Dr. Tenma, he loved Honey all the same and tells her so before dying.
• In the Nanoha franchise, Precia Testarossa completely lost it when her daughter Alicia died of illness. She first created Fate as a clone of her (and ended up abusing her for not being a copy of her "sister"), then centered her Mad Scientist plans on finding a way to actually revive her.
• Private Actress:
  • The first chapter has Shiho being hired by a rich man's secretary to impersonate a girl named Miyu who's supposed to have died with her mother in terrible and weird circumstances, and whose body was never found. The girl's father, Sendou, is about to die of illness and his biggest wish is to see Miyu one last time... so the secretary hires Shiho to pretend to be a living Miyu, so he'll die happy. The man does realize that Shiho isn't Miyu, but doesn't tell her to her face; after his death, aside of her pay she's is given a poetry book and a letter where he explains this and thanks Shiho for being by his side in his last days.
  • Another case plays with it and Reincarnation: an artisan's eldest daughter was the victim of a Serial Killer 16 years ago and he pretty much went mad as a result (plus he's implied to suffer memory gaps due to brain damage after an accident he had in his search for the killer), so the man's now-adult youngest daughter hires Shiho to pretend that she is the reincarnation of her late sister and help the emotionally-shattered father to deal with the cruel loss. Not only it works, but they find the killer and capture him.
  • The Boarding School case involves the mysterious death of a junior high-aged Cute Bookworm, Fuyuka Sakuragi, whose parents suspect that she was literally bullied to death. So they hire Shiho to infiltrate the school and see if they're right. They are. And the culprit is the local Alpha Bitch, Kana Juumonji.
• Later in GoLion / Lion Voltron, two episodes involve dealing with the Team Dad Raible/Coran's biggest regret: the deaths/disappearances of both his wife and his infant son during the fall of Altea/Arus. Especially when a boy named Saint/Garret shows up and many leads point at him being said son, giving the team hope that the trope was averted... It wasn't: the guy's son had truly died/been spirited to Another Dimension, and the boy was either a Galra spy (GL) or an android (Voltron)
  • At the very end, it turns out that Witch Honerva was the mother of Emperor Daibazaal. One finds out after Daibazaal's son Sincline has killed him (or better said, succeeded on getting him killed by the good guys), which gets her mad enough to betray her grandson. Logically, this is censored in Voltron.
  • Halfway through the series, one of the Beastman was created from a woman from the Gorgon race, who had just lost her child and her people due to The Plague. Her maternal instincts were still intact, however, and she ends up bonding with Hiroshi.
• Digimon franchise:
  • In the original, Koushiro Izumi was adopted by his uncle and aunt not only because of his parents' deaths, but because right around the same time said aunt and uncle lost their own baby son. They kept it a secret to not needlessly hurt him, but Koushiro found out anyway and kept it to himself; later, they explain everything in detail and say that they love him for their own person, not as a Replacement Goldfish.
  • In 02, Ken Ichijouji's older brother Osamu was fatally hit by a car. Not only this doesn't "fix" Ken's The Unfavorite deal, but it saddles him with guilt since they had a huge fight few before his death.
• It regularly happens in the Gundam metaseries, of course:
  • In the original one, Sovereign Degwin Zabi lost his third son Saslo in an assassination attempt (the same one that heavily scarred his second son Dozle) years before the series took place, and the death of his youngest son Garma in the war is what makes him fall in despair.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Nicol Amalfi's parents Yuri and Romina are seen mourning for him after he dies in battle.
• MANY Sympathetic Murderers from Detective Conan fit here, killing their Asshole Victims for having caused the deaths of their children.
• Fullmetal Alchemist deals with this in all its incarnations:
  • Pinako Rockbell's son and daughter-in-law, Winry's parents Yuriy and Sarah, were doctors who died in the Ishvalan War. The exact circumstances differ depending on the version: in the 2003 anime, Colonel Roy Mustang was forced to execute them and ended up heavily traumatized over it; whereas in both the manga and the Brotherhood anime, they were accidentally killed by Scar, who couldn't control his newfound alchemy powers - and had Scar not done it, Kimblee would've executed them anyway under orders of the higher-ups.
  • Izumi and Sieg's son was a stillborn, and Izumi's reason to be an Ill Girl is that she lost her reproductive organs when she tried an Equivalent Exchange to revive him. She also tells the Elrics that she empathizes with their desire to bring back their Missing Mom due to this.
  • In the 2003 anime, Envy is the Homunculus "born" from Dante and Hohenheim's attempt to recover their lost son, whereas Wrath is the "product" of Izumi's own try to do the same.
• Mitsuru Adachi uses this trope at least twice as Wham! Episodes:
  • In Touch, Kazuya Uesugi gets fatally hit by a car 1/3 into the story. This means Shingo and Haruko outlive their kid, and his older twin brother Tatsuya becomes an Angsty Surviving Twin.
  • Everything in Cross Game changes when Wakaba, the Tsukishima family's second daughter and Kou's girlfriend, dies in a summer camp accident at the end of the first part.
• The plot of Ano Hana begins years after the death of Meiko/Menma. Her parents Manabu and Irene have quite the difficulties handling their grief over her. Especially the latter.
• In Ooku, several of Ienari's kids die. His wife Shige totally loses it when not only her son perishes, but she's accused of having killed him via poisoning his sweets to frame her husband's mistress, O-Shiga. The real killer, however, is Ienari's cruel mother Harusada... And it turns out Shige is not as crazy as she pretends to be, and in fact both she AND O-Shiga (whose kid was also a victim of Harusada) are planning their Revenge...
• In Dragon Ball Z, Vegeta winds up losing his son, Trunks, twice. First, after Future Trunks was blown in half by Super Perfect Cell with a Death Beam, and second when Kid Buu destroyed the Earth with his Planet Buster Bomb attack (taking Gohan, Goten and Piccolo with it, additionally affecting Goku, since the former two are his sons). It hits harder watching this happen to Vegeta, since we see his genuine response in witnessing Trunks's death both times - going ballistic, futilely attacking Cell despite him being leagues stronger than Vegeta, and chewing out Goku for opting to save Mr. Satan, Bee and Dende over their children instead. Though to be fair, Vegeta was dead himself when the younger Trunks died. And he'd already died once before Trunks had even been conceived.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Erina Pendleton-Joestar outlived her son George, an Ace Pilot from World War I, when he was murdered by one of Dio Brando's last zombies. For a little while near the end of Battle Tendency, she believed that she'd outlived her grandson Joseph as well. It was fortunately averted with the comical reveal of Joseph's survival.
    • Joseph would later outlive his own grandson, Jotaro Kujo, and his great-granddaughter, Jolyne Kujo, who were both killed by Enrico Pucci at the end of Stone Ocean.
    • In Stone Ocean itself, Enrico Pucci's long-lost twin brother Domenico aka Wes Bluemarine aka Jolyne's companion Weather Report was Switched At Birth with a dead newborn by the kid's grieving mother.
  • When Noriaki Kakyoin dies in the final battle against DIO and The World, among his many final thoughts are his still-alive parents back home in Japan, before his mind drifts to the final question that puzzled him.
• The controversial Transformers: Kiss Players is kicked off by this trope. After Galvatron was thrown out of Unicron, he made a dramatic crash landing on Tokyo that killed millions, including a young girl named Shizuku Amaō... whose passing turned her mother, Hitoshizuku, once a peaceful scientist, into an anti-Cybertronian general.
• The action in Maria no Danzai begins when Maria Nagare's son, Kiritaka, is literally bullied to death by a bunch of cruel classmates who force him jump off a cliff. Maria learns more details as she reads the boy's diary, and two years later she gets herself hired as the school's nurse under her maiden name Maria Akeboshi, so she can begin her Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Gang of Bullies...

Art

• Pictured above: The Pietá by Michelangelo, representing Mary holding on to her son Jesus's corpse after he's taken down from the cross.

Comic Books

• Martha/Ma and Jonathan/Pa Kent in The Death of Superman.
  • In Superman itself, Cat Grant's son Adam Morgan was one of several children who were kidnapped and then killed by Toyman. Toyman claims that a malfunctioning roboty copy of him did it, however.
  • Supergirl's adoptive parents had a son named Jan, who joined the army and was Killed in Action.
• Transformers:
  • The Freudian Excuse of Unicron's creator in Transformers: Unicron. The Thirteen Primes invaded his homeworld, Antilla, with his daughter being among the casualties of the attack. In response, he reshaped his world into an anti-Cybertronian weapon (Unicron). Though Optimus can understand his grief, he feels that he's taking it way too far. Especially because several Elonians mourn that they're now consigned to this fate thanks to Unicron.
  • While Cybertronians don't have offspring in the traditional sense of the word, the 2019 comic paints Bumblebee as having gone through this after Rubble died, grieving in the worst possible way.
• The Punisher takes the revenge aspect of this trope and runs with it, with the death of his wife and kids serving as his motive to kill all criminals.
• X-Men: Holocaust survivors Max Einsenhardt (under the name Erik Lensherr) and Magda Lehnsherr settled down together in Vinnitsa (in then-Soviet Ukraine) with their daughter, Anya. When Max briefly lost control of his mutant powers during a fight with his Bad Boss, an angry mob (including some KGB agents) burned down the inn where the family lived, which killed poor Anya. The rest is, well... history.
  • Surprisingly, this trope is revealed to be the Start of Darkness for Dr. Nathaniel Essex aka none other than Mr. Sinister. He was a somewhat normal upper-class doctor and scientist in Victorian England until his and his wife Rebecca's son, Adam, was born with a severe illness and passed away at age 4. The poor boy's death led the increasingly unstable Dr. Essex to start his experiments, and he even dug up the kid's corpse to experiment on him too, and as THAT led to a pregnant again Rebecca completely rejecting his now crazy husband and to having a fatal miscarriage, well...
• Justice League: Cry for Justice saw Roy "Red Arrow" Harper being maimed and losing his daughter Lian during the destruction of Star City, which was brought about by Prometheus.
• Due to the Time Travel, Cindy Wu in Titan's Doctor Who comics outlived the thousands of clones of herself that she set loose in Ancient China (including one that's implied to be an ancestor of hers).
• In DC Comics' Flashpoint, eight-year old Bruce Wayne was the one who was shot dead by Joe Chill rather than his parents. As a consequence, Dr. Thomas Wayne becomes Batman... and Martha Wayne becomes The Joker.

Fairy Tales

• In the Brothers Grimm story "Godfather Death", Death marks their adopted child, after having defied their instructions one time too many, to have their lifespan represented by a very short candle that quickly burns out, consigning Death to this trope. Ironically the straw that broke the camel's back was the child preventing a king from falling victim to this.
• In Hans Christian Andersen's The Child in the Grave, a mother all but loses it after her only son dies at age 4. A heart-to-heart with the boy's soul right before he goers to Heaven brings her back to her senses.
  • In The Story of a Mother, a little boy dies of illness and his Mama Bear goes through many hardships so she can talk The Grim Reaper into giving him back to her. This includes giving up her beautiful eyes and her just as pretty hair. She finds Death (portrayed here as an Anti-Villain who just does as God says) and he gives her back her missing body parts... but tells her that she's defying the will of God and thus is VERY likely to condemn her child to a life of misery. Once it sinks in, she lets Death take the kid away so it won't happen.

Fanfics

• If I Could Start Again has Odin and Frigga's second son, Baldur, having died an hour after birth. As the author points out, Frigga logically had to be publicly pregnant with a child that would die young as no one called out Loki, who was believed to be Odin and Frigga's biological child, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.
• In The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds, King Spykoran, Spike from My Little Pony TV Specials lost his child, their mate and his unhatched grandchildren to an Ursa attack, save the Spike from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• In Ma Fille, Louise outlived her daughter Heather, who died from childbirth complications.

Film

• Though she's not his biological mother, Aunt Cass outlives Tadashi in Big Hero 6.
  • Professor Callaghan's belief that he's this is what led to his villainous schemes.
• It's not really focused on much, but Marlin in Finding Nemo outlives all but one of his hundreds of unborn children.
• In Knives Out, Harlan's mother is still around to grieve him. For reference, Harlan was 85 years old at the time of his passing. Harlan himself outlasted his son Neil.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy had his planet invaded by Ronan under Thanos' orders. He was part of the lucky 50% that lived while his daughter was part of the other half.
  • Miriam Sharpe in Captain America: Civil War outlived her son Charlie, who was among the casualties of Ultron's attack. As was Zemo's son: it's what drives his feud against the Avengers.
  • With the exception of Nebula, Thanos outlives the entirety of the Black Order in Avengers: Infinity War.
  • In Avengers: Endgame, all three of Hawkeye's kids fall victim to the Snap. Likewise, Past!Thanos is the last of the time travellers to disintegrate, once again outlasting the Black Order.
  • Gorr the God Butcher's Start of Darkness in Thor: Love and Thunder is him falling victim to this.
• Star Wars:
  • The Rise of Skywalker reveals that, during the Time Skip between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, Emperor Palpatine's son was killed on the orders of his not-quite-dead father... and Palpatine fully intends to outlive his granddaughter as well.
    • Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith #25 takes it one step further by teasing that Palpatine, via midi-chlorian manipulation had a hand in Anakin's conception. If he is, which is Anakin's belief, then Palpatine has outlived a lot of his descendants. Even more if one considers Snoke to be his offspring. Rey is the only descendant of Darth Sidious who managed to outlast him, and she had to be brought Back From the Dead by Ben Solo's Heroic Sacrifice given that it took a Mutual Kill to end Sidious.
  • When Padmé perished in Revenge of the Sith, her parents were there to mourn her and the grandchildren that, as far as they knew, died with her. Anakin's own belief that he fell victim to this was a factor in him resigning himself to living as Darth Vader.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek III: The Search For Spock:
    • Sarek and Amanda fall victim to this before Spock comes Back From the Dead.
    • Kirk's son David Marcus dies protecting Spock and Saavik from the Klingons, much to Kirk's agony. Kirk's mourning for his son proved a critical plot point in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as Kirk now hates the Klingons with a burning passion that it's enough for a Frame-Up.
  • In the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, Robert and René Picard died in a tragic fire, leaving Marie Picard to mourn both her husband and son.
  • In the 2009 film, Nero lost his unborn child to the supernova that destroyed Romulus.
• Tallahassee lost his son to the zombies in Zombieland.
• In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone is gunned down in an ambush while his father Vito is recovering from his own gunshot wounds. Finding out that Sonny's dead is what spurs Vito to make peace with the rest of the mafia families.
  • In The Godfather: Part III - The Death of Michael Corleone, an assassin shoots at Michael... but kills his daughter Mary instead.
• Shown in Anastasia, in which Dowager Empress Maria outlives both her son, Tsar Nicholas II, and four of his five children. Truth in Television — the real-life Dowager Empress was in Paris at the time of the Russian Revolution, and thus survived it.
• In Pinocchio, Geppetto goes through this when Pinocchio is apparently killed by Monstro the Whale while pulling his father to safety. Fortunately, this is subverted as the Blue Fairy rewards Pinocchio's heroism by reviving him and turning him into a real boy.
• Manny's backstory in Ice Age. His wife and child were killed by cavemen, and that's why he's become so bitter and cynical.
• Casper's parents in Casper. His death drove his scientist father to build a machine that grabbed his late son's spirit.
• The Man in the Iron Mask has Athos' son Raoul subjected to The Uriah Gambit by King Louis XIV. Naturally, Athos is pissed off at the King for it.
• Wilson Fisk's primary motivation in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the accident that claimed his son's life.
  • Aunt May of Earth E-1610 outlasted her version of Peter Parker.
• In The Dark Crystal, Mother Aughra is the immortal Anthropomorphic Personification of Thra. Her adopted son Raunip from the Expanded Universe is none of those things, perishing either from the wounds he gained in the Field of Fire or due to the Darkening, while his adopted mother lived for over a thousand trine afterwards.
• Scream
  • Big Bad of Scream 2 Nancy Loomis. She cites this when she finally confronts Sidney.
  • Detective Wayne Bailey in Scream VI outlasted his son. Half of the Big Bad Duumvirate of the 2022 film, Richie Kirsch.
• The first Mad Max film sees the death of the titular hero's infant son. Losing his wife not long afterwards brings about Max's Heroic BSOD.

Literature

• The Bible has multiple examples. The most famous ones include: the deaths of all the Egyptian first-born sons as part of the Tenth Plague, Naomi losing her two sons (one of them being Ruth's first husband), the resurrection of a boy whose widowed mom is friends with the prophet Elisha, the deaths of at least three of David's sons (Amnon, Absalom and his unnamed first kid with Bathsheba), the ten Jewish brothers tortured to death by the Persian King Antiochus's guards in front of their mother before she's killed as well, the Massacre of the Innocents where all the boys under two years old around Bethlehem were executed under Herod's orders, the death and raising of Jairus's Ill Girl daughter, Jesus's own death on the cross in front of his mother Mary, etc.
• Harry Potter:
  • The Diggories outlive poor Cedric in The Goblet of Fire. There's a heartbreaking scene at the end where Harry must relay the news to them, and Cedric's dad Amos is pretty much sobbing through it.
  • Fred Weasley is among the casualties of the Battle of Hogwarts, invoking this for both Arthur and Molly in Deathly Hallows.
• In the old Star Wars Legends continuity, Han and Leia outlived two of their three children, Anakin and Jacen, with Anakin dying in the Yuuzhan Vong war and Jacen getting offed by their one surviving child, Jaina, after his Face Heel Turn.
• In the Bad Future portion of A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit and his wife outlive their youngest son Tiny Tim because Scrooge refused to give Bob enough money to pay for the lifesaving medical care that Tim needed. Fortunately, this vision helps lead to Scrooge's Heel Face Turn and, in the real world, Tim ends up surviving.
• Gone with the Wind: Scarlett and Rhett lose their child Eugenie aka Bonnie Blue, who breaks her neck in a riding accident. Since Bonnie was her parents' favorite kid, both took the loss badly - Scarlett accused Rhett of killing Bonnie for not putting his foot down regarding her riding safety, Rhett drowned his pain in alcohol.
  • There are several other examples, such as Dr. Meade and Hugh Calvert losing their children to war.
• In The Hunger Games, the very nature of the eponymous competition invokes this for the parents of the losing tributes, such as Rue's parents, but it prominently happens in Mockingjay to Mrs. Everdeen after her youngest daughter Primrose/Prim is killed. Even worse, it's later revealed that the death was not just an unfortunate casualty of war but that Prim was a victim of a False-Flag Operation.
• The Argentinian writer Poldy Bird once met a lady named Frida who asked her to write her a story about her daughter Miriam Raquel, who died at nine years old. She actually wrote two stories, one specifically dedicated to "Miriam Raquel, forever nine years old", and another about a second meeting with Miriam's parents, who gave a tea set that belonged to her to Bird's then-young daughter Veronica.

Live-Action TV

• On Earth-2 in Arrow, Robert Queen survived the shipwreck while Oliver didn't.
• King George III in the third series of Blackadder.
  • Subverted in the finale of the first series. It looks like Richard and Gertrude will outlive Edmund, who is barely clinging to life, but Percy poisoned the whole vat of wine, not just a specific set of goblets, and the royal court dropped dead after toasting Edmund.
• The Punisher's crusade in Daredevil is started by the death of his family, his daughter in particular.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the post-2005 show, it's mentioned that the entirety of the Doctor's biological family is dead, presumably including his children. Gallifrey later shows up safe and sound, but there's no mention of his family with Clara saying in the Series 8 finale that all of the Doctor's children and grandchildren are missing and/or presumed dead.
    • His granddaughter Susan outlived her own son, Alex Campbell.
  • It was authorial intent in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe that Marnal was the Master's father and thus victim to this during the time of the Eighth Doctor (not that Marnal ever gave a damn about his embarrassment of a child) before the Master came back to life. The establishment that the Master had a daughter in the television series suggests that this is the case for them as well, given the Time War.
  • The Empress of the Racnoss in "The Runaway Bride". Her Famous Last Words are her crying about this.
  • Ashildir/Me in "The Woman Who Lived" outlived every child she had, losing one to the bubonic plague.
• In Game of Thrones, all three of Cersei and Jaime's children die.
• Riverdale: Clifford and Penelope Blossom outlive poor Jason. Because Clifford killed him. When Clifford, and later his identical twin brother Claudius, die, poor Nana Blossom outlives both of her sons.
  • Midge Klump is killed by the Black Hood in the latter half of Season 2, leaving her mother to grieve in the worst way possible.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Technically happens to Counselor Troi in "The Child." Ian was a humanoid avatar used by an alien but everyone regards him as having passed when the alien departs.
    • In the third season episode, "The Offspring", Data constructs an offspring, only for her positronic matrix to suffer a cascade failure.
    • The seventh season episode, "Dark Page", reveals this to be the case for Lwaxana Troi.
    • This trope resolves the conflict in "Journey's End." Having lost two of his sons to the Federation-Cardassian war, Gul Evek will not start another war and risk losing the third.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, all three Klingon captains from Star Trek: The Original Series; Kang, Kor, and Koloth; were revealed to have lost their firstborn sons to the machinations of the Klingon terrorist, the Albino.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • The fourth episode sees the death of Icheb, Seven of Nine's adopted son, with her being forced to pull a Mercy Kill on him.
    • The seventh episode inflicted this fate on Deanna once again, with her and Riker's son, Thaddeus, succumbing to a silicon-based virus.
    • In Season 2, Adam Soong has outlasted many of his Artificial Human daughters. Not that he was ever personally affected by their deaths beyond annoyance at having to go back to square one.
• As J'onn J'onzz is the Last of His Kind on Supergirl, he's outlived his daughters. He's very protective of his surrogate daughters, Kara and Alex, as a result.
• RoboCop: The Series sees Alex Murphy's parents alive and dealing with this, as they're unaware their son was resurrected as the titular cyborg. "Corporate Raiders" ended with Alex's father Russell learning the truth and Alex swearing him to keep it a secret.
• Happens many times in Cold Case. i.e., A Time to Hate has a woman whose son was killed in The Sixties in an alley behind a gay bar asking Lilly and the team to reopen the case and solve it 30 years later, before she herself dies of an illness.
• Infamously happened to Mr. and Mrs. Ross in Seinfeld after Susan dies from licking the toxic glue found in extremely cheap wedding envelopes that the infamously cheap George Costanza bought. Her parents were unsurprisingly rather bitter towards George from thereon out.
• In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Yori Nakajima outlasted his son RJ. Leah even notes the unnaturalness of this trope to Bucky Barnes, who killed RJ during his Brainwashed and Crazy stint as the Winter Soldier, flagging that there isn't even a word for someone who lasts longer than their child.
• The (in?)famous "Fatal Beatings" sketch from Rowan Atkinson Live. The headmaster, Rowan Atkinson, calls in Mr. Perkins to discuss Tommy's poor academic performance, revealing during the discussion that he beat Tommy to death for taking library books without a library card.

Music

• Luis Alberto Spinetta's song "Era en Abril" ("It happened in April") is from the perspective of a couple struggling to deal with the miscarriage of their son.
• Eric Clapton turned his grief over his son Conor's death from an accidental fall into a Grammy-winning smash hit song, "Tears in Heaven" (1992).

Mythology

• Classical Mythology:
  • Niobe, with her seven sons and seven daughters, boasted of being greater than the goddess Leto who only had two children, the twins Apollo and Artemis. As a mix of Disproportionate Retribution and punishment for Niobe's Hubris, Leto had her twins kill all of her children.
  • In The Tragedy of Herakles, the eponymous hero is driven mad by Hera, leading him to kill everyone around him, including his children.

Video Games

• Deadeus: This will happen to the mother if the boy dies in the Drowning Ending and the Jump/Final Ending.
• God of War is kicked off because Ares tricked Kratos into killing not only his wife Lysandra, but also his daughter Calliope. In the PlayStation 4 game, Kratos' companion is his young son Atreus (whose mother/Kratos' Second Love Faye passed away some time ago) and he's quite determined to not let ANYTHING bad happen to him.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us has a similar set-up, with Joker turning his Joker Gas on Superman, driving the maddened Kryptonian to kill not onlyu Lois Lane but their unborn child.
• In the prologue of The Last of Us, Joel's daughter Sarah is shot and killed by a panicking soldier. The experience (as well as two decades of surviving the Zombie Apocalypse) has hardened him into a rather bitter and cynical person by the start of the game.
• In Saints Row 2, Kazuo Akuji ends up outliving his son Shogo, after the latter attempts a suicidal attack on the Boss and Johnny at a funeral that ends with him getting Buried Alive. Kazuo is later fought as the final boss of the Ronins storyline, but he doesn't seem all that bothered by his son's death.
• In Mortal Kombat, Hanzo Hasashi's young son Satoshi was murdered alongside his mother Harumi and the rest of the Shirai Ryu. His death is one of the many reasons why Hanzo, now Scorpion, is literally Hell-bent on getting his Revenge.
• In Tekken, Dr. Bosconovitch created the Robot Girl Alisa basing himself on his dead daughter, also named Alisa.
  • The nameless Intrepid Reporter who more or less narrates the story in 7 lost his son and wife in the wars instigated by the Jin-led Mishima Zaibatsu.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Gaiden and Echoes: the kids of King Lima IV of Zofia were killed by his Evil Chancellor several years before the story started, save for one: the lead girl, Princess Anthiese aka Celica. And in Echoes, another of Celica's siblings survives: her Canon Foreigner older half-brother, Prince Conrad.
  • Fire Emblem Fates: the Deadly Decadent Court of Nohr included not only Garon's son and heir Prince Xander, but the children of Garon's MANY concubines. Out of all of them, only three survived the in-fighting: Camilla, Leo and Elise. (The Avatar doesn't count since s/he was raised in a Gilded Cage and wasn't mothered by one of these concubines). And in Birthright, Xander and Elise also die: she perished in an Heroic Sacrifice to save the Avatar from Xander, and he dies fighting the Hoshido troops soon afterwards.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, this happens many times:
    • A VERY shady antagonistic group, Those Who Slither in the Dark, is said to have pulled this on many people. More exactly: they performed horrible experiments on many noble children to forcibly implant them with Crests, and almost all of them either died or went crazy as a result. Only two girls, Edelgard von Hresvelg and Lysithea von Ordelia, managed to live through and keep their sanity more or less intact - but Lysithea became an Ill Girl not expected to live for too long.
      • Additionally, a Paralogue features an Adrestian nobleman whose daughter, a Black Eagles schoolgirl, has been kidnapped by the same mysterious group and being held for ransom: either the guy gets them a certain Relic, or the girl dies. Problem is, the group is Those Who Slither... AND the kidnapped girl is Monica von Ochs, who's subjected to Kill and Replace by the Slither hitwoman Kronya anyway. While she survives her kidnapping in the retelling Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, she can still be killed off in battle either before or after the Time Skip.
    • Lord Rodrigue Fraldarius lost his eldest son, Glenn, in the infamous Tragedy of Duscur. This also deeply affected his remaining son Felix, whose relationship with his dad was severely damaged as a result. And if one plays the Crimson Flower path and recruit Felix, he may end up fighting Rodrigue to the death.
    • This can happen with Gilbert aka Gustave Dominic if his daughter Annette is killed in battle; either in Azure Moon on Classic mode, or in Crimson Flower if she is not recruited and killed in the final chapter and Gilbert is not.
    • Any student with living parents who isn't recruited on any given route and is either a mandatory kill or not spared by the player.
    • This can potentially happen with Seteth aka Cichol, if Flayn aka Cethleann is killed on any non-Crimson Flower route. Crimson Flower, curiously enough, goes out of its way to avert this; if one is killed by a unit other than Byleth, they will both die after the chapter ends. Otherwise, they both survive and go into hiding.
• Happens MANY times in the Dragon Age games:
  • In the first game, the City Warden's brother Fergus loses his wife and child.
  • In the second game, one of Hawke's younger siblings (whether it's Bethany or Carver) will be killed depending on Hawke's chosen class. And their mom Leandra will take it badly.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa Gaiden: Ultra Despair Girls reveals that Chihiro Fujisaki and Kiyotaka Ishimaru (the second and third victims of the Killing School Life, respectively) were outlived by their parents. Their fathers, Taichi Fujisaki and Takaaki Ishimaru, were even "chosen" as captives because of how close they were to their kids. Taichi is ultimately reunited with his son in the afterlife after he's mauled to death by a Beast Monokuma.

Western Animation

• Family Guy:
  • Peter Griffin outlasted his child Bertram, born from semen that Peter donated, who was killed by Stewie and Brian. Though Peter was never even aware of Bertram.
  • As a result of Black Comedy and Negative Continuity, Peter and Lois have outlived Peter Griffin Jr. (shaken too hard by Peter as way to get him to stop crying), a girl (implied to have been killed by Meg when Chris was very young) and Dave Griffin (Stewie's twin whom he killed in the womb).
  • Joe and Bonnie Swanson's son Kevin was said to have died in Iraq, leaving them in deep mourning before Kevin revealed that he was Faking the Dead.
  • In "Stewie Is Enceinte", Stewie rears Brian's kids but the myriad of birth defects, such as the deaf one not hearing Joe's lawnmower, claimed all but four of their lives.
  • According to Peter's narration at the end of "Turkey Guys", Stewie will die at four to five years old, leading to his still alive parents divorcing.
  • Quagmire's parents may have outlived their daughter Brenda. In "Coma Guy", as Peter is on the border between life and death, he's invited on a boat to the afterlife, populated by characters who have been Killed Off for Real. Brenda is among the dead but the audience is never shown how she died (nor is she the only one who meets that circumstance) and it's unclear if the whole thing is real or in Peter's head.
• Grand Pear (Applejack's maternal grandfather) and Granny Smith (Applejack's paternal grandmother) in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. To be fair, Applejack's parents are never outright said to have passed, but it's pretty heavily implied with Word of God confirming it as the intent.
• In The Simpsons, both Homer and Abe express the hope that they'll outlive their children.
  • Though in the "Treehouse of Horror" shorts, they've both (along with Marge) fallen victim to this a multitude of times.
  • In "Days of Future Future", Homer dies with Abe still alive. Abe even manages to outlast Homer's Body Backup Drive.
• Kenny's parents. Frequently.
• Much to White Diamond's shock and horror in Steven Universe, Pink Diamond (AKA Rose Quartz) is confirmed to have been Killed Off for Real via Death by Childbirth, fulfilling this trope.
• Tales of Arcadia:
  • In Trollhunters, Gunmar is enraged to learn that Bular died before him. It's also said that Nancy Domzalski lost her son to a cruise ship that sank, leaving her to raise Toby.
  • In 3Below, Varvatos Vex's backstory has his whole family dying in a terrorist attack on Satellite-9.
• Empress Honerva (AKA High Priestess Haggar) in Voltron: Legendary Defender suffered from The Dark Side Will Make You Forget for most of the series. When she gets her memories back, and pulls the Sincline mecha out of the Quintessence Field, she's heartbroken to find that her son Lotor is dead, and completely loses it.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, before the start of the series, Uncle Iroh's son Lu Ten died during the siege of Ba Sing Se. Iroh took his death so hard that he abandoned the siege and retired from the Fire Nation army. Incidentally, this event led to his Heel Face Turn in his backstory, and to him being very protective of his nephew Zuko.
• Vandal Savage in Young Justice has outlived many of the children he's sired over his 50,000 years of life, either because they fell in battle, they didn't inherit his immortality or they got Age Without Youth and he pulled a Mercy Kill on them.
• Across the Multiverse in Rick and Morty, many Ricks have outlived their Mortys, sometimes even killing them.
  • Beth and Jerry C-131 outlive their version of Morty who dies in "Rick Potion #9".
  • The Tragic Villain Psycho for Hire Jaguar outlived his beloved daughter. Revealing this was the last mistake that the Agency Director ever made.
  • Morty is very likely a victim of this given that his half-Gazorpian child, Morty Jr., aged to becoming an old man in less than 24 hours.
  • After a hint in "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort", "Rickamurai Jack" confirms that Rick's original Beth is dead, killed by Rick Prime out of indignation that Rick didn't play ball. And the worst thing is that Beth C-137 was just collateral damage. The bomb was only meant to kill Diane C-137.
  • In "Solaricks", Rick Prime is revealed to have outlasted his daughter and granddaughter. He then completes the set by killing his son-in-law.
• Pedro in Solar Opposites is killed by the Duke's forces while his father Enrique lives on.
  • Korvo outlives Yumyulack in the Season 2 finale. But death for Shlorpians is not a very permanent thing.
• Happens a disturbing amount of times on American Dad!. Timey-wimey circumstances usually undoes the death(s) or the episode is simply non-canon. Canonically, there have been a lot of close calls.
  • Two definitely canon instances occur in "Son of Stan" and "Steve and Snot's Test-Tubular Adventure". In the former, Steve-arino, a psychotic clone of Steve, is shot by a cat while Stan is alive and well. In the latter, the specifics of cloning technology grant Steve and Snot's cloned daughters a lifespan of but a few days. Steve's daughter dies before his crying eyes while Stan just kills Snot's.
  • "White Rice" implies that Hayley had a twin brother who Stan refused to get vaccinated. While Hayley survived, Bailey did not and Stan unpersoned him.
  • "The Longest Distance Relationship" suggested that Hayley would die before Francine, Stan already having had his head ripped off by the ape uprising, before Jeff prevented this future.
  • Depending on how one qualifies the death, Jeff Fisher's father outlasted his son as of "Holy Shit, Jeff's Back!", Jeff having been replaced by an alien named Zeebler. Zeebler later overrode his own consciousness with Jeff's and a complicated series of events eventually resulted in a Body Backup Drive.
  • In "Father's Daze", the family celebrates the death of a pair of twins that Stan hates, the song including a line highlighting their mother falling victim to this.
  • In "300", Stan and Francine outlast Steve and Hayley in the struggle for the Golden Turd (for about two minutes anyway). Roger alters time soon afterwards to undo the deaths.
  • "Enter Stanman" suggests that Stan will attempt to invoke this, given his displeasure when he learns that Steve seeks to outlive Stan (as in just by being younger and dying later). And in the earlier "May the Best Stan Win", a possible future did show Stan upgrading into an immortal cyborg while Steve and Hayley died.
  • In "Yule. Tide. Repeat.", the family burns to death during a Christmas tree lighting gone wrong, or dies in the immediate chaos, leaving Stan to outlast Hayley and Steve. Some Peggy Sue Christmas magic lets him fix things.
• Futurama: Being both his own grandfather and a Human Popsicle, Fry long outlasted his father/son, brother/grandson, and every other descendent of his until the Professor.
  • The Waterfall lineage has a serious problem with this. Free Waterfall Jr. died in Season 2, his father Free Waterfall Sr. died in Season 3 and his father Old Man Waterfall died in Season 4.

Real Life

• Happens in places with high infant mortality rates.
• Enzo Ferrari famously outlived his son Alfredo "Dino" Ferrari, who passed at the age of just 24. In his honour, Ferrari named an engine he'd worked on, the Dino, after him.
• Pro-wrestling legend Fritz Von Erich had six sons - and outlived them all except for his second son, Kevin.
  • His first son, Jack, was killed in a freak accident at the tender age of six in 1959.
  • His third son, David, died in 1984 after suffering a heart attack in his hotel room while on tour in Japan.
    • David also outlived his daughter, Natasha, who died in infancy.
  • His fifth son, Mike, committed suicide in 1987, overdosing on painkillers. Mike never wanted to be a wrestler, but was pressured into the business by Fritz, and the pressure only got worse after David died and Mike was handpicked to be his replacement.
  • His youngest son, Chris, committed suicide in 1991, shooting himself in the head with a hunting rifle. Unlike Mike, Chris really wanted to be a wrestler, but due to his small size (he was listed as 5 feet, 7 inches and weighing 201 pounds) and a medical history of asthma, he had little chance of succeeding.
  • His fourth son, Kerry (the most successful of the boys, as he defeated Ric Flair to be the NWA World's Heavyweight Champion in 1984), committed suicide in 1993, shooting himself in the chest with a sawn-off shotgun. His marriage was falling apart and he had been arrested twice for drug possession. According to Bret Hart, Kerry had been planning for months to take his own life.
• Eric Clapton's son Connor died in 1991 at the age of four, after falling out of an open bedroom window on the 53rd floor of a Manhattan apartment building. This was the basis for the song "Tears in Heaven".
• William Shakespeare and his wife Anne buried their son Hamnet at the tender age of eleven years old.
• When Freddie Mercury passed in 1991, both his parents (Bomi and Jer Bursara) were still alive.
• Percy and Mary Shelley famously outlived three of their four children.
• Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria Hungary and his wife Empress Elisabeth (also known as "Sissi") lost two of their four kids: Sophie died of typhus at the age of 2, and Rudolf (also the heir to the throne) died under suspicious circumstances at the age of 30 in the Mayerling incident. Both deaths greatly traumatized Sissi, especially Sophie's.
  • The actress Romy Schneider, who became famous for playing Sissi in several movies, lost her son David in freaky circumstances - the boy tried to climb a fence into his grandparents' home, but then he slipped and fell on the pointy rails...
• Several US Presidents have gone through this:
  • JFK and Jackie Bouvier-Kennedy lost two children: Arabella, who was a stillborn, and Patrick, who died two days after birth from HMD... two months before his dad was killed.
    • Speaking of the Kennedys, John was the third child Joseph and Rose Kennedy had to bury - they'd already lost a son, Joseph Jr., in World War II, and a daughter, Kathleen, in a plane crash. Then, one of their two surviving sons, Robert, was assassinated in 1968 during his own presidential campaign. Of their four sons, only one (Edward/Teddy) lived to old age.
    • It's said Jackie Kennedy left the U.S. and moved to Greece after RFK's murder to avert this potential fate for herself and her own children. Thankfully, she did not live to see her son John Jr. die in 1999.
  • It wasn't enough that Mary Lincoln's husband was assassinated before her eyes; she also had to bury three of her four sons: Eddie (tuberculosis, 1850), Willie (typhoid, 1862, during his father Abraham's presidency), and Tad (1871, six years after his father's murder). Little wonder she ended up institutionalized (by her own surviving son, Robert, for which she never forgave him).
  • Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin was killed in World War I. TR himself died not long afterward, perhaps of a broken heart. His widow Edith had to bury another son, Kermit, who took his own life in 1943.
  • George H. W. Bush's daughter/George W. Bush's younger sister Pauline, AKA "Robin", died of leukaemia at age 3. It's believed that her mother Barbara Bush's hair went gray much earlier than normal due to her intense mourning over her.
  • The 46th President, Joe Biden, lost his daughter Naomi to a car crash in 1972 and his eldest son Beau to glioblastoma in 2015.
• Adolf Hitler outlived his niece, Angelika "Geli" Raubal, who had been like a daughter to him. Though the death was ruled as a suicide, some believe that Hitler, who had come to redefine Overprotective Dad and may have thought further of Geli, killed her or had her killed.
• In 1973, the Greek-American businessman Alexander Onassis died as his plane crashed. His parents, Aristotle Onassis and Athina "Tina" Livanos, both fell in despair over it; Tina died in late 1974 of either a pulmonary edema or a drug overdose, and Aristotle died in 1975 of pulmonary failure.