i'm coming too

I don’t know if I’ll remember what it feels like to hold a malnourished child in my arms, or not, when I return home. The one I hoisted today smelled of urine. Her unsmiling eyes and big cheeks occupied too much space on her head, wobbling unbalanced, too heavy, atop a mismatched skeleton: those tiny rib bones, legs clinging koala-like to your torso (the length of her enfolded into your body), that coarse, rusted hair, her vapid breathing, her silence. The tight, shiny skin on her baby feet, swollen to bursting, makes you want to turn away, like an off-key vulture screech.

I used to thrust myself forward in time, dream a moving picture of me shuffling around a refugee camp, working at a starvation center in a foreign place. I know that means sweating with people who badly smell, of urine and waste, of infected breath, of cells disintegrating, of third-world medicines, of fear I think, of the energy it takes to die. Maintaining human life begins to feel like a factory effort. There’s just too many of us in this forsaken world, and so many are lost eventually in the tossing and upheaval of disease or poverty or abuse or not enough food.

I am unsettled that no one is holding them. I am bothered by the cloudy half-vision of this present world.

After breaking up with Patrick, in the winter I lived quietly in the city, it dawned on me for the first time that the older I grow, there will be less and less keeping me safe. Fewer people, and then none. This realization - it isn’t anybody’s business to care for me - shocked me, like taking a final, irrevocable step out of childhood, like waking up for the first time at age 25.

I lay down on the carpet in my room, beside the bed and space heater, and felt scared. I fingered all the beautiful half-pieces of faith I had but couldn’t figure out how they fit together, how in the half-vision I now possess, how it all works out. I still don’t.

I wrote a lot back then:

Came home today, alone in the house. Doorbell, drunk older lady with a child. She’s the mother of the woman, Rose, who lives downstairs. Rose: I don’t care, what the fuck, take her to jail, call the police, she can live on the streets I don’t care! So I get my car, we pile in - the woman, whose name is Jean; the child, Lydia, who is in 6th grade; and I – and we make our way to another relative’s house across town, except we can’t find it because, duh, Jean is drunk, squinting and breathless in the backseat. Call 911: Where’s detox? Shouting from Jean, cursing. Driving in circles around south Minneapolis, spinning tires in dirty urban snow. Jean: more shouting, whining, running away from the detox center. Me begging the unsympathetic cops to find her, fretful, impatient: She’s going to hurt herself, I’m afraid! Don’t want the young girl, Lydia, to hear what is said, but she is nonchalant, more at ease than I am. Afterwards we go to McDonalds, she informs me that her uncle Tim – Rose’s husband - was caught sleeping with Rose’s best friend. No wonder all the yelling downstairs lately. She tells me about her Grandpa, who is one of those guys that panhandle on the corner near our house, holding the cardboard sign: Please help, homeless, God bless you. Later, back at home, doorbell, it’s Lydia with Sasha, Rose’s daughter, two giggling cousins: Can we borrow your jump-rope? Then Sasha, more serious: Mom and Dad are fighting again. Mom is drinking, and she’s not supposed to, she spent two years in therapy!

What do you even do with it all? Lydia with her dark Indian hair dyed a god-awful golden color, her auntie putting out cigarettes in my back seat, fumbling, falling, cross-eyed, confused, can’t remember her own name. Jean kissing Lydia, all boozy and sentimental. Lydia, whose mother sent her away for the weekend with a drunk relative, ordering her: Don’t you leave your auntie, Lydia, not for one minute! Jean dashing across a busy four-lane street, shouting into the wind. Lydia, straight-faced, bored, as her auntie is swallowed up into the back-alleys: Can we go to get some food? I haven’t eaten all day.

I’m shaken up by it, is the truth. I’m not naïve, but I’m still shaken. I feel vulnerable, I feel like I am walking around without anyone watching, no one protecting me from behind. Let me steady the arm of an alcoholic grandmother; but let there be one behind me, one holding me under my armpits, one who is over, bigger, stronger, more secure. I want to pretend I am not frightened by this, our world; but I am, deeply. I am not paralyzed so that I cannot or will not respond; but I am not impervious to the raw fear underlying such brokenness ‘out there’.

What if I am lost to it all, washed out to sea? Who will hold my hand, tightly?

Who will pull me back, hold me fast?

I am still bothered by this. I am troubled that not everyone is shielded. I watch our babies and moms at the clinic, and I see that some are lost, just washed away. Why isn’t the safety and holding for everyone, me, them, 100%, all of us?

Faith says we ought to hold each other and I do hold them.

Ah - but only for 20 minutes. That’s all I can manage. Jacqui beats back the waves, shields them with her entire being, furiously, but can only do so for as long as they show up to the clinic, weekly, for a year, three years, five. It’s something, huge even, but it’s not enough. That’s what unsettles me.

They go home. They get hit by their husband. Or maybe he’s a good man, but can’t find work. Or dies. There’s no food. The moms and babies go home and it rains, walls of water, and their mud-walled home collapses in on itself. Or their toddler accidentally burns it down. Their seven-year old is admitted to the hospital with dehydration, and while they are there, being saved, thieves steal everything in their house. Every blanket, every potato. Rats eat the nipple off their baby bottle. Their TB goes untreated. Their children are kidnapped, thrown into pits, and sold to South Africa.

I am speaking in specifics of patients I know, not generalities.

I see the young mother on Tuesday, the 22 year-old with an endearing lisp and stutter, and her son with cerebral palsy, luminous prince of Africa. We smile, hold hands, laugh, and then next week both she and the son are dead. Just gone. Though the feeling of having held them stays with me.

Being so close to their ‘raw pain’, as I wrote back then, scares the heck out of me. It scares me for me, and it scares me for them. I dredge up more fears from within myself, circle warily, irresistibly, around faith, finally go home, make a chicken sandwich, eat a chocolate bar, bathe away the urine smell of the disappearing child I picked up, and listen to Ben Harper on repeat while I type out modern-day lamentations all evening long.

I got a text message today, while riding a jolting Mozambican bus in the afternoon glare, that dearest Belusha has finally left us, passed away imperceptibly at home with her mother in their empty, white-washed home set deep on the Mozambican savannah. I close my eyes to picture the grass expanding out from there, into forever, perhaps all the way to heaven. I think about how much pain she carried in her six short years, and I thank God it's gone. I want to cry but nothing comes.

I am worried. I am returning home soon, in one month. And what if I can’t remember it - all of this, the babies and the glances, the jokes of old women, burying our cat beneath a mango tree, the interminable distance of Africa when hitch-hiking, how burnt bean stew smells like coffee, all the potential it holds, all the torments, pink fog resting on the backs of fishermen, the feel of Belusha's hand in mine - when I am back in America?