Small Lives

I'm not sure how to reflect about today. The patient's death seemed so quiet, so mundane in the setting of the clinic, that not many people looked up from their routines. The mother's cries were a shift from the pattern of the minutes before, but other than that, we all drifted out of the room and back to our tasks with little more than a pause to consider the tiny body on the bed.

I had started writing about her death, about the small spark of life and how quickly it went out after her arrival at the clinic. But putting the words down made it seem so much more the spectacle, so much more than the passing of one life, among thousands that die every day in this continent. And that is really what I felt when I was watching her life go; how her story was so very, very common. Even while I grieved this baby I did not know, it seemed she was just an infinitesimal statistic in Africa. You could throw your entire being away here, you could pour every drop of energy, money, effort, into this parched soil, and it would hardly change the waves of lives being lost through lack of IV needles, through lack of sanitation, through people walking miles to reach clinics where no one can care for them, through mothers who bear children too young and too often, through oceans of shit and sadness and loss.