Death

Warning: Readers may find this painfully honest post depressing, graphic, or disturbing. Read on at your own risk.

One hundred percent of people die. Everyone I know who is alive right now—including myself—will die someday.

I know that. Intellectually, at least.

But somehow, it seemed like in Africa, there was more death. We were surrounded by it, everywhere. The first few times, I cried. After that, I got calloused, and then even indifferent. Apathetic. I didn't know how else to cope.

The first people were total strangers, but it was still memorable because we watched them die.

We were driving down the highway and passed a couple on a bike—an old, wobbly bike. He was on the seat, she was sitting sideways on the bar in front of him, his arms around her and hands on the handle bars. We saw them alive, but didn't think anything of them. They were just a couple drops in the sea of pedestrians and bikes along the highway. A couple miles later, our driver (Paul, a Canadian missionary) got pulled over for speeding, and while he tried to haggle the fine down a car pulled up behind us and reported to the police that there had been an accident. They huffed at Paul and accepted half the fine they were going to charge, jumped in their car, and sped off to the scene. We also doubled back and went to see if we could help in any way.

The couple on the wobbly bike had been hit by a semi-truck.

The woman was obliterated. The man was still dragging a few rasping, last breaths. Jon and Paul jumped out of the car and ran to him, desperately praying those breaths would keep coming and that he would live. The police thought they were crazy, but left them alone. I stayed back in the car with Paul’s sister, and we were also praying, but just not ready to get that close to the gory scene.  I don’t remember how far we were from the nearest town with a hospital, but there was no chance of any emergency vehicle getting to them in a reasonable amount of time. After what felt like a very, very long time of lying in the road, the man breathed his last, and was gone. The police drug him and the woman off to the side of the road, my stomach churned when they picked her up and it looked like not a single bone of her body was intact. Some bystanders threw some sand on the blood and entrails in the road. Traffic resumed. Just another day in Africa.

I thought a lot about them in the following weeks. Who were they? Had they been married? Did they have any children who were now orphaned? What would become of those children if they did exist? Did they have any relatives to take them in? So many unanswered questions.

Then there was a little boy, 5 years old. He had been attending a program we were helping with, which was a free lunch and Bible story that the base put on every day for about 150-200 local village kids. I had shared in my broken Portuguese about the time that Jesus gathered all the children to himself when the adults were trying to push them away, how much He loved each one of them. After hearing the story, the little boy ate his lunch, got up with his siblings and friends, ran out of the base and was crossing the street to go home.

And was hit by a car.

By the time we got to him, someone had thrown a cloth over his little body, but I could still see his tiny hand sticking out from under it and a bright red river of blood streaming from where his head was. At least that time, I knew the last thing he had heard was how much Jesus loved him.

Those deaths were in our first year, when we were still technically “short-term missionaries”. When we signed on long-term, it became worse because it was no longer strangers.

One of our Bible school teachers, Amos, with the impossibly wide smile. He loved bringing his accordion to church to help lead worship. Died in a mini-bus accident on his way to work. He lived 3 hours away, and the accident happened when he was only 5 minutes from his destination.

One of the kids in our center, Domingos, with the two little brothers. At 11 years old he had lost both parents to AIDS and was living with an aging grandfather before social services brought the three to us. I sat on the porch in silence with my arms around those two little brothers the morning he died of cerebral malaria.

Another one of our kids, Marcos, 16 years old with a stutter but the heart of a prayer warrior. It was hard watching him get thinner and weaker every day as his body slowly failed him. Some relatives took him away from our base when he was sick, and they refused to take him to the hospital, opting instead for the witchdoctor. We don’t know what he was sick of, but whatever it was he died a couple weeks later.

A close friend’s wife, Judite, with the quiet spirit and generous heart. She and her husband had taken in 25 orphans and raised them as their own. Their first child was born prematurely and died a couple days later, their second child lived, but after giving birth to their third she had bad hemorrhaging and was in and out of the hospital for months. She died in her husband’s arms when the baby was 3 months old. A little while later, the baby girl died, too.

A teenage boy who had been raised in our center, Joao, with hopes of attending a trade school. Ambitions and his whole life ahead of him, except for that nagging tuberculosis. He wasn’t mindful of keeping up with his medications, and after a while his disease became resistant to them anyway. Every time I saw him he was thinner, if that was even possible. Then he, too, passed away.

You get the point.

That was just a few of the the people we knew personally who passed while we were there. We had 50 workers on our base, and it seemed like every week one of them was coming to us saying they had lost a relative. A mother. A son. A sister. A cousin. A granddaughter. A nephew. One of our kitchen workers, Chica, lost her uncle, mother, sister, and husband all in the space of 2 weeks. A few days later she was back in our kitchen, cutting tomatoes and stirring those impossibly huge pots of corn mush. Life went on.

With our workers and members of our church, we would help with the funeral expenses and provide transportation for the family to the burial.

Ah yes, the funeral transports. No fancy, silk-lined hearse. Just a big, open-bed truck called a camion, coffin in the middle, and about 50-70 people stacked on top of each other all around it. A wooden cross with the deceased’s name held up just behind the cab of the truck. We would see at least 3-5 such funeral trucks every single time we would drive the 30 minutes to the nearest city. How often do you see funeral processions in the States?

Death. It was literally everywhere. I’m ashamed to say, I even rolled my eyes in exasperation sometimes, thinking, “Not another funeral…”.

It puzzled me for a while. Everyone dies, in every country all over the world. Everyone. So why did it seem like there was there so much more death in Africa? My guess is because the deaths were so much younger. In wealthier countries, we have access to food, clean water, safe homes, and medicine, we can stay alive until we are old and senile and die alone and forgotten in nursing homes. In Africa, they don't even have nursing homes. Life is cut off so often when people are still so young. Couples try to have as many kids as possible, hoping, praying that at least a few of them live to adulthood and be able to have families of their own. About half never even make it to their 5^th birthday. Diseases. Accidents. Disasters. Wars. Famines… Life is just more fragile in that environment. A couple months ago we even lost a former fellow missionary to malaria, Calli, who was the most amazing, selfless, generous, loving, and hilarious Texan you could ever meet.

I guess that’s why it’s so jarring when we are confronted with young deaths here. They just don’t happen that often. Yes, we also have car wrecks, cancer, and other random accidents, but even so, I attended more funerals in my 3 years there than I have in my 25 years here. And none of them were old people.

Last night we attended a memorial service for a girl who died in our dorms a couple weeks ago. I didn’t know her personally, but it has still impacted me. She was 19 years old, you would have thought she had her whole life ahead of her. But not anymore. My great aunt passed away last year, but she was 93 and ready to go. This girl didn’t even get to a quarter of that time on earth. As her friends and family members each took their turn describing her life and their memories of her, I was saddened by their loss. So much potential, snuffed out so early. She sounded so cheerful, the one to brighten everyone’s day. The one to push people out of their comfort zones and into something greater. I’m sad I never got to know her, and now I’ll never have the chance. Even here in the first world, death can come far too young.

Life is fragile. Cherish the ones you love while they are here. There is no guarantee they’ll be here tomorrow.