This Loss

Death is so real when it is this close. On Monday, I saw a baby die.

I was working, and my task was simple. A new supply container had just arrived, and we were unloading it, carrying stacks of boxes up the gangway and in to the hold of the ship. They were latex exam gloves, and we had to move them in first because all the wards had been out for a week. Two minutes before, I walked down to the dock and held my arms out to be loaded for the tenth time. I could have been inside the ship restocking, delivering to the wards these urgently needed gloves, in the bathroom, taking a water break, but I wasn't. It was no accident that from behind my wall of cardboard, I heard a wailing that I can still feel resonating inside of me. A woman, a mother, thrown to the floor was pounding her fists, smudges of wet around her on the green painted floor, and the sound coming from her was deep and gripping. I am told this is the African way to mourn. Her tears were violent, spreading like blood around a murder victim. They were her protest and her pain, and at first, I thought the doctor running in was coming to her. But he didn't. He stopped short and bent over the table, over a bundle of wrapped cloth, over her baby.

I remember what it looked like, and I remember knowing that it was dead before the doctor said anything. Its little body was still and rubber-like beneath the stethoscope. Its face was already dim, and it's closed eyes...I think anyone looking at the baby would know.

I have never experienced death this close. I had no idea how to deal with it. Death had never impacted me before. So I stood there shocked, and the tears started to come. I had to leave work. This woman had come to the ship because her child had a lump developing on its neck, and she was leaving it with this emptiness. Soon I was in my cabin, lying face down in my bed and scream-crying into my pillow. I looked like that mother, and I just kept thinking about what she was feeling, like her life had been ripped away. Later, I wrote in my journal that my soul was sore. I was still thinking about the baby well into the night, and I remember it today. I don't think it is something I will forget.

But this is the amazing part: that through it all, God is good and He is stronger. I was praying Sunday night on the top deck of the ship. It was getting towards the end of my time, when God gave me a verse. This is such a new thing for me. It has only happened once before, but I am learning more about what it means to pray. I saw it in my mind: Matthew 5:4 like the bright lines a flashlight makes once you close your eyes. I don't know the Bible well enough to have a clue what this verse says, and so I turned to it.

Blesses are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Sunday night, I thought about this verse in the context of mourning for the time I have spent away from God. Monday morning, it flew back to me, and I knew that God was with me as I watched that mother. Even more so, He was with her, comforting a mourner.

In my rational mind, I felt completely unprepared, taken utterly by surprise. I thought about how profound and shocking my experience of this death was because it was so unexpected. But in my heart, God had already given me a verse, so that I might be prepared. Doesn't He do this in all of our lives, if only we are aware? And so I know even more truly that right here, in Benin, in this darkness, tonight and always, that He is Lord.