The Hardest Thing
A month or so ago I was asked by my good friend Heike, who knows my love of babies, if I found it really hard working with babies who are dieing. . I answered “No” and wondered even as I answered why it wasn’t. I love babies, I think it’s a sin against nature, God and everything in the universes’ order that they have to die so why was I not finding it as difficult as I know she would…..or most people would? I have held my own little girl in my arms, as she died which was the most painful thing imaginable. It was like open-heart surgery without an anesthetic. I wondered if I had just deliberately closed off my heart, as it would be too difficult to work here if I didn’t, or had I somehow found a peace with it? I knew whatever it was I needed to identify it to myself so I could be sure it was not just some unhealthy delayed coping technique that would leave me a basket case in a year or so.
Last Thursday I discovered what it was. Last Thursday I had to do something more painful than watching a child die. I was sitting in my office when a doctor from the hospital arrived with a small boy. He looked about two years old, I discovered later he was four. The doctor is a woman I have worked with before at the hospital but always with a translator, as her English is as bad as my Spanish. This time there was no translator and she looked distressed as she told me that this child’s mother had died with AIDS and he was left at the hospital. She told me his name is Niko and he speaks English and turned around and started to leave. I stopped her at the door, somewhat incredulous that she thought she could bring him and leave him here like a package left at the bus depot. She told me his grandmother lived on the mainland but was poor and alcoholic and his only other relative was an aunt who wanted nothing to do with him. She told me if I didn’t want him to take him to the children’s’ home and left me standing there with a very small boys’ hand in mine. His face showed the evidence of a day (or maybe several days) of tears so I picked him up and sat in my office chair just holding him until I decided what to do with him. Taking him home was my first thought (no surprise to those of you who know me, I’m sure) but I was very aware that I cannot take home every orphan in the program and to start with the first one abandoned in my office didn’t seem like a good idea. I also knew, and this was a huge factor, that we cannot afford another child right now.. We are already worried about supporting the two we have, it would just not be possible to add another child into our family right now. The only choice was to take him to the children’s home. “It will be okay” I thought. They will feed him and make sure he is clothed and sent to school. Off to the children’s home we went, Niko looking excited to ride in the van. As I strapped him into Hayley’s car seat I had a sense of the irony. Here I am, safely putting him into a car seat to take him to a place I know is so very unhealthy for him. What’s wrong with the children’s’ home? It, like many things here, is run by a minister and supported by a few churches. The children are well fed and all of them are sent to school so they are better off than most children on the island by those standards. The problem lies in their complete lack of understanding of what children really need. There is one woman who looks after fourteen children. There is another woman who comes in to clean several times a week but essentially these children are looked after by a woman who knows how to cook but never hugs them, nor kisses them, nor teaches them how to care for themselves. They literally run wild, never doing any thing except attending school with any regularity. They are not taught to shower, brush their teeth or comb their hair. They are not taught fair play, sharing or respect. They are not chastised when they hurt others, nor comforted when they are hurt. The psychologist who works with our program has been there many times trying to make them understand that children need affection, discipline and structure but nothing ever changes. She has been personally responsible for providing sheets for the children and re-covering the ripped couches to reduce the insect infestation. She had told me, just the day before, how she wished to take several of the kids home with her if she could have but her husband refuses. I have witnessed how the children, starved for affection, run to her for hugs when she arrives.
This is where I took Niko. I sat with him for some time trying to impress upon the housemother that he needed special care but by the blank look on her face, even as she nodded yes, I knew he was already just another one of the kids.
I know now that when Dawn died in my arms that I knew she was going to a better place. I have never been a big supporter of organized religion but I have always had a strong sense of God in my life and Dawn’s death confirmed that belief, not because I needed it to, but because I was there when she went to God and I know the reality of it as much as I know the reality of my own existence. Babies here who die are going to God, go to their often all ready dead mothers’ spiritual arms. Even if you believe in nothing after death then dead babies just cease to be. They are not suffering any more. They paid for this pandemic with their lives but they are gone. It is the Niko’s of this world that pay the highest price. To never be held in a parents arms, to never know love, that is hell.
So, no, to watch a child die is not the hardest thing I have done…. it was leaving a child in hell.