so tonight i am up...there are a lot of reasons i could site...but its probably because there is a baby dying in our house...i am not even there...house sitting of all things...but my heart and my thoughts rest with aron...except they don't exactly rest...about a week ago the face of dying children began to narrow from a dark blurry idea to something more like an actual image...i was in the hospital where we take our children who have aids and tb waiting for an x-ray...i could sense tension among several staff that passed by and later my concerns were confirmed when they escorted two women through our hallway, both clearly weak...wailing and mourning, one calling out "petit mwen, petit mwen"...my baby my baby...now, i am the one who has been ranting for years about the state of affairs for children around the world...i know and am quick to tell people that 30 thousand children die around the world EVERY DAY because they are HUNGRY...not to mention those who are born with or develop other problems...problems that wouldn't have even been a blip on the radar for me as a baby in the states...but this wasn't 30 thousand mysterious invisible children somewhere....this was ONE baby...this was ONE mother...not mourning the global crisis we face...she mourned only one loss...a loss that filled her whole world...i was taken apart by the realization that the loss of this baby was in some ways just as big as the loss of all the ones that will have died that day...it was one baby...but i am certain the void couldn't have felt any larger if all 30 thousand mothers had been wailing in that hallway with her...we each clung to the child in our own lap...sick though they may have been they lived and breathed and felt suddenly heavier now that we were bearing the common guilt of surviors...but at some point we were each called in...got our examinations, picked up medications, had x-rays taken...bought some rice on the street...got on a tap tap...waited for our rides...everyone was different except that for each of us life kept moving while that mother laid in a chair holding her dead babies clothes...and now that reality has come home with me...once again i am facinated with how life and death, beginnings and ends, the sacred and the profane...they all lay so often side by side in our universes...we blow bubbles and dance with children then force food into a baby's sunken belly...comment on a drawing of kites and triangles while we change a diaper filled with blood...count racing heartbeats and shallow gasping respirations as wild healthy children dance and praise god with along with their favorite dvd all around us...pack a bag of food for a woman who you aren't sure can surive the walk home and then pack the bag of a baby now healthy and headed home with a smiling father...put away toys and time seizures...teach a girl with one hand to sew at the same table where you have scrubbed the burnt flesh of a nine year old with nothing but tylenol to numb her pain...cook and console and laugh and inject...cry and clean...teach and bury...somehow it is all part of the same thing...today dorothy and i stood side by side...me holding sterling and she aron...it was the weirdest moment as i looked into the eyes of a child in whom the lights seem to just be coming on and life beginning to emerge from and dorothy into eyes that seem to be drifting farther away slowly, almost carefully letting go...the reason it was weird wasn't how different their situations seems to be...it was how similar...one didn't feel like a success and the other a failure to me...both life and death are welcome to me...one is my companion for a season and the other my slave forever conquered already for eternity...and the same is true for these babies...life is a gift from god but death is merely a reuniting with him...either way they win...but its ridiculous and insulting even to pretend the loss isn't there...ive already seen it...already felt it...so who is losing, what is lost...and why...i haven't got the first clue...but maybe now i can sleep.