Just when I think I am escaping the long arm of Kinshasa, she reaches across borders and steals into my life. The news comes at midnight. A baby has died.
Funerals in Kin are all too common. They are just as likely to make Saturday evening plans as going out to dinner, more likely in fact. But this funeral...This baby was the little girl of a friend. One whose birth we anticipated with eagerness and celebrated with joy. A roly poly fat baby girl I had held on my lap and made googly eyes at, quickly forming that connection that can only be made between infants and their adorers. She was, at that time, about the same age Mbalia is now. Yet she's become a statistic, one of those many African children who don't make their 5th birthday. Or even their 1st.
I can't sleep because of it. Mohamed has been sick for days with malaria and bronchitis and so naturally my fears are heightend. What separates us from the statistics? Mbalia remains a source of pure joy. Imagining her gone is the stuff of nightmares. My heart aches for the mom who has lost her precious and calls up other parents I kow who have faced this grief. I am forever reminded of one of my undergrad professors who pointed out that we lack a name for a parent who has lost a child. Without a label, without a word to easily explain this new state transition is made all the more difficult. A child who has lost a parent, however, can spend time with their orphan status, turning the word over and over in their mind, connecting with other orphans, seeking refuge in houses built for orphans. A parent who has lost a child, however, must relieve the details each time an innocent question comes up-do you have children? how many children do you have? Never again to be answered without qualification.
It's not a matter of how they will go on- life offers little choice in the matter, bringing forth a new day with each rsing of the sun. They will go on. The question really lies in how they will be changed by their loss. What kind of scar will this wound leave on their soul? And will they be able to manage the healing together? (Even looking for a link to put in here is telling. A search for couples who have lost a child turns up much about grieving together, the challenges of staying together and the need for communnication and healing but these are geared at Americans. Try to add Africa or African couples into the search term and the results change radically. There is nothing about grieving, healing or finding support. No, it will not be easy for her.)
This is not news for the night. Christian should have known better than to tell me of this in the darkness. My fears grow large and it takes all my will power not to turn on the lights and watch my treasures sleep. The sorrow stays with me for days. There is nothing I can do to help the mom from here, or even from there, honestly. But thoughts of her trouble me, creeping in to color the sunshine with a haze stronger than the harmattan which has settled in around us. I whisper a thousand prayers of thanks and gratefulness each time I make eyes with Mbalia or hear her sweet baby sounds. My heart splits in two; melting in adoration even as it swells with desolation.
“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain
weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain
intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
―
Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
