March 9, 2011
Dear Friends,
Ay Dios! No hay palabras. The sky rains down hard, strange for this time of the year, with all of its thunder, and the floods fill the streets and it won’t stop for anything. I drink my reserve of my sister’s good English loose tea, the one I keep hidden, in an attempt to staunch the suffering.
Oh dear God. Burned now into the soft part of my heart forever, her little perfect head, her long black hair. She was so cold, icy, and floppy when we dressed her for her coffin. Her little white coffin, puffy in satin, as if somehow that could make it softer. Her teenaged brothers, and the littler sisters are beside themselves with grief, the mother collapses, the father sags.
I meet them, I rush, to the hospital, and they wait, and together, in the back of a black pickup truck we travel out onto the highway home. We drive slowly, as to not bounce anyone, and a Xoyita bears down on us, and honks, and I want to scream! Back Off! And the oldest brother clings to the little white coffin, and holds it, and the tears fall down without ceasing, his face soaking.
Down the ravine and up the next, and down and up, and we are home, in the ruined cornfields, washed out in last year’s floods. The girls’ faces lighten up to see me, and fall again when their mother gets out of the truck and they remember.
In the adobe house, the dirt floor, a low table waits. Candles, flowers, and there he places her, the oldest brother, as if this is his job alone. We sit on benches and the women wail, and keen, and the men shake their heads in disbelief.
The numbers, the stupid numbers, erase from my mind. How many children die before five in this stupid country? For no reason. For human sin and the famine of love. No need. Fury would rise in my heart, but no time. Now I am the one here to speak the word of God. It is my job. It is not cheap, or trivial. This is the promise of our beloved Christian story: death does not kill life. The God of Love gathers all of this beloved creation, into the everlasting arms. Such love is in this place, and still the chasm of pain . . .
They bring me water. We want to baptise her, they say. My heart quakes, and I speak to my interior liturgist – what now God? What is your Word in this broken house? I bring out my book, we are people of the book, we Anglicans. I don’t have my glasses, dammit. I force my eyes to read, and I create something, a mix of the blessing of the water of baptism, for the washing at death, and we bathe her little body, and her grandma and I dress her in her baptism clothes, white and pink. She is already perfect, without blemish or sin, she is already in the arms of God. But they need me to bless her this way, and that’s all that matters, and we wrap her one last time, and tuck her into her mother’s arms, and then at last into the coffin again.
I go off. It is Ash Wednesday. We gather eight or nine of us, and we smudge and we pray, and I say the words again, and we go back out into the world . . . solemn, marked each one with ash on our foreheads, fed with Holy Things.
Tomorrow, we bury her, Nataly Missel. Pray for us, please,
Emilie
