Vilomah: The Witness Archives

“How are you doing?” Four words, asked a hundred times a day, by people who don’t actually want an answer. For most people, it’s a verbal nod — confirmation that two people are both still here. For an estimated 18.7 million of us, it’s a trap door. In this episode: the hidden labor of answering that question honestly and dishonestly in the same breath, why it isn’t deception — it’s protection — an...

As of this broadcast, more than 993 million children have died worldwide since 1950. By the formula published at anantavilomah.com, the count crosses one billion on January 1st, 2028. Here in the United States, there is no actual count of parents whose children died. In 2022, Evermore put 18.7 million Americans on the record. Apply the University of Texas at Austin age-based rates (about 9% by age...

Say Their Names. Gordon M. Aamoth, Jr. S-49 Edelmiro Abad S-40 Marie Rose Abad S-34 Andrew Anthony Abate N-57 Vincent Paul Abate N-57 Laurence Christopher Abel N-32 Alona Abraham S-4 William F. Abrahamson N-7 Richard Anthony Aceto N-4 Heinrich Bernhard Ackermann S-55 Paul Acquaviva N-37 Christian Adams S-68 Donald LaRoy Adams N-55 Patrick Adams S-45 Shannon Lewis Adams N-49 Stephen George Adams N-...

It’s Labor Day weekend. Cookouts. The last trip to the lake. Everybody’s phone full of the grill, the cooler, the last swim before the water gets too cold to bother. Here’s what doesn’t make it into the caption. For an estimated 18.7 million people in this country, a holiday isn’t a day off. It’s a day you do math instead — how many summers, how many cookouts, how many Labor Days gone by now witho...

Did your doctor know? Did your therapist know? Did your clergy know? Somebody knew. And they didn’t say anything to you, did they…? In 2021, researchers in Sweden published a study on over 6.7 million parents, using decades of real medical records from Denmark and Sweden going back to 1973. Out of that group, 126,000 had outlived a child. What they found: parents who outlived a child carry a 20% h...

The same field that grew the worst thing that ever happened to me also grew something else. Standing right next to it. Not replacing it. Not softening it. In the same dirt. The same rearranged landscape. The same gutted terrain. I can sit in a room now with somebody else who’s carrying the same thing we all carry, and not say a single word. Both of us know exactly what’s happening. That’s somethin...

There’s a number out there that gets used for everybody who’s ever had someone close to them die. Eleven percent. That’s how many people end up with grief that doesn’t ease — grief that stays heavy long after it’s supposed to lift. That number was never built for us. Top of the list. Two researchers, Monique Champion and Doctor Meegan Kilcullen, went looking through seven hundred sixty-seven studi...

The world has a very polite definition of chaos. They think it's misplacing your keys for five minutes on a hectic Monday. The freezer logic. When a high-voltage event overloads the main processor — the conscious, decision-making brain — the system does not simply crash. It partitions. The body starts routing data it can't safely process yet to secondary storage. The body becomes the hard drive. T...

; There comes a point in this journey when the diagnostic language goes quiet. Not because the system failed — but because there are things that live below the reach of any system. The silence between the words. ; The signs don’t arrive on schedule. They don’t announce themselves. They come in a cardinal on a fence post. A song in a parking lot that stops you cold. The specific quality of an Octob...

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with being Vilomah. Not the loneliness of an empty room — anyone can name that one. This is the loneliness of standing at the same bus stop, the same office, the same holiday table, watching a wall of black water come in off the horizon, while everyone else around you is talking about blue skies. You wait for the all-clear. The one you were promise...

This is not a self-help framework. This is not a grief counselor with a certificate on the wall. This is a field reporter standing in the same wreckage, offering you one thing: I will not lie to you. The contract. A contract is an agreement between two parties that defines what is owed, what is offered, and what is not negotiable. The Vilomah Contract says: precision, witness, and company. No plat...

There is something the grief industry never quite gets around to telling you. Not the stages. Not the timelines. Not the five-step framework for processing what you are carrying and returning to a functional baseline. Something more specific than any of that. The waves. Nobody spoke to you about the waves. They gave you stages, timelines, a framework built for someone else’s comfort. What they did...

Seven episodes in, you know the number. An estimated 18.7 million Americans are parents who have buried a child. Estimated — because there is no official count. The framing is wrong. The data already exists to fix it. This episode names three specific things the federal government already has the power to do. Right now. No new law required for any of them. The price of the missing count first. The...

The system once knew we existed. In 1850, the federal government did more than record who died. It recorded who was left behind: the parents who had to wake up the next morning, keep living, and carry a loss no policy has ever fully named. For 35 years, bereaved parents appeared in the federal record. We were counted. We were visible. We existed in the data. Then the system changed. Not by acciden...

Somewhere between the time you started reading this and the time you finish it, more children will have died. The parents they left behind will not appear in any database. No registry. No federal count. No agency whose job it is to track people will have tracked them. 12:20 AM EST That is not an oversight. That is the architecture. This episode is about the scale of what the world has refused to f...

The United States tracks a lot. Births. Deaths. Illness. Job loss. Hunger. Homelessness. Unemployment. It even tracks how many people got caught in the rain. What it has never tracked — not once — is how many parents have outlived a child. By the time this episode ends, roughly 95 more children will have died somewhere on earth. That number is moving right now. It doesn’t pause. And the parents le...

Today the record gets a second word. Ananta. Sanskrit. Infinite. Without end. Not a stage. Not grief alone. Not something you move through and come out the other side of. A permanent conscious state — present on good days, bad days, and every ordinary Tuesday morning in between .The Grief Industry looks for resolution. A return to baseline. A way forward. Ananta says no. The record doesn’t resolve...

Before there was a word for what we are — there was Job. He was handed exactly what 18.7 million bereaved parents have been handed ever since. Explanations. Platitudes. A quiet pressure to move on. He refused every one of them. This episode is about what a witness actually does. Not perform recovery. Not arrive at peace on someone else’s schedule. A witness stays present to what is true, names it...

Someone came in today. A person found Episode 1 and stayed. This episode is for them — and for every Vilomah who has been sitting in silence waiting for a name. In 2006, a professor of English at Duke University buried a child and found that the world had no word for what she had become. She went into Sanskrit — the oldest of languages — and found one. Vilomah. Against the natural order This week,...

This is the first Podcast: "Professor Holloway at Duke University discovered the word" 18.7 million people in the United States have buried a child. If we stood in one place together, we would be the largest city in the nation — larger than New York, larger than Los Angeles. The world has no word for us in English. No registry. No agency tracking us. I looked. There is nothing. This podcast exists...