Brokenness

I watched a child die today. A baby boy of nine months. I’ve seen children in their last minutes of life, and I’ve seen them minutes after death, but this was different. I watched, my eyes locked on his tiny, sickly frame, as his breathing and his heart stopped. I watched him go from living baby to corpse. Malnourished, anemic, and infected with malaria, he was barely alive when I arrived at the health center; it was simply too late. As Jennifer tried to get an IV in him, I noticed a subtle change in his appearance which I can’t really describe, and I suddenly I couldn’t see his chest moving any more. A cold, tight feeling settled in my stomach as I realized that I was an eyewitness of his transition from life to death.

His mother collapsed on the floor in almost melodic wailing, as women here mourn death, and the crowd that had been forming around the bed continued to grow. I wondered what the other mothers there on the crowded ward with their kids must have felt. But these women are no strangers to suffering. Watching this death, I was struck very powerfully by what a broken world we live in. Everything about it was just wrong – this is not how the world is supposed to be, this is now how lives are supposed to go.

Seeing the horror of death firsthand and being confronted with the brokenness of the world brought to mind something I’d just read.

“Who then are the mourners? ... They are the ones who realize that in God’s realm of peace there is neither death nor tears and who ache whenever they see someone crying tears over death. The mourners are aching visionaries.” ~ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

That’s the hardest part of it, this feeling that everything about it is wrong. It’s not simply sad, it’s not just terrible; but every fiber groans with the inescapable feeling that, with this boy’s death, the fabric of the world is wrenched further apart. I realize that must sound pretty melodramatic, or sound like it should incapacitate me for days, but neither is the case. The feeling of brokenness is very real and deep, yet I was able to go about the rest of the day’s work (the ease of it is frightening sometimes). The feeling of wrong-ness has not left. I'm guessing it isn’t meant to.