Living with Dying

I helped as I could while Nthabeleng bathed Amohelang, and then Nthabeleng handed the child to me so I could hold her. I took her into my arms and slumped down on the floor, cradling the baby gently as Nthabeleng went to tend to other children. Then I just sat alone with Amohelang for a while. In retrospect, I think our sitting became the sort of meditation Shunryu Suzuki himself might have found worthwhile. We just sat in silence together, breathing. Her job was just to breathe, and mine was just to watch and root for breath.

At times, I felt as if I was breathing through her, and so her breaths were my breaths too. I felt my heart was beating through her sometimes too, and so her heartbeats were my heartbeats as well. I could feel her struggle, too, could feel her competing infant instincts both to strive for life and stop for rest. In retrospect, I wish that evening I'd had the proper medicine, the right equipment, the requisite training to save Amohelang's life, but I didn't, and at the time I didn't much care.

I wasn't frustrated or angry at what I wasn't able to offer her, I was just grateful for what I could. In a pastoral symbiosis I've never otherwise experienced, I became really, simply alive to another's dying. Amohelang just needed to be held, and I just needed to hold her. I cried at times, and I felt her cry through me; I smiled at times and felt her smile through me. But mostly we just sat; she just needed holding, and I had just the arms for the job. For two short hours, we sat together in silence while she breathed.

I don't want to pat myself on the back too heartily here. The cradle of my arms didn't extend Amohelang's life one whit, and she died in hospital the next morning while I was on a bus to the capital worrying once again, hoping this time to catch my early flight back home. And since then, of course, at the bedsides of hospital patients and the cribsides of other dying babies, with medical staff bustling all around always offering their best answers and likeliest remedies, I've mostly failed to live up to the deaths of dying others.

But occasionally and in odd moments I sometimes consider without thinking that the living perhaps need harbor little final fear of dying, less so perhaps of death, however imminent those frightening moments are for us. With Amohelang dying in my arms, I was not afraid. I was sad, but afraid neither for her nor for myself. The future and its worries simply folded into my arms with the body of that dying child, and there remained only one unending present moment, timed to the tempo of her wheezing, failing breath, one moment of me holding her in my arms. My only hope is, when I die, someone I love will find a way to live it through with me.