Stories

I actually wrote most of these words late last night in my daughter’s muppet notebook by the intermittent light of my cell phone while Annabelle slept in the room with me. Now it is late once more, the night before another long trip. But the words are still burning in my heart, like they need to be written again.

Granted, I had a few reasons to cry already when Bryan called. Devastating news of cancer from not one but three dearly loved people in my family’s life has reached us this week leaving us feeling far away and helpless. It was my baby sister’s last night in Tanzania for what will probably be a long time, and the last time I will see her before some sweet and yet unknown reunion in the future. And after almost three weeks apart I am just flat out missing my husband. Five minute phone calls on a satellite phone just aren’t cutting it anymore.

So Bryan could have told me just about anything last night and I probably would have started crying. But when he told me about some of the stories he had heard that day, not so much narrating a story as flatly stating facts out of his own numb shock, I felt like something inside of me broke.

He told me that people spent the afternoon talking to him about how when they ran for their lives, leaving everything behind and walking through the wilderness for weeks to get to safety, the very old and the very young were most vulnerable. This is not surprising. I’ve probably even said that very thing to others before. But I’m not sure I ever stopped to imagine what that might mean. I didn’t imagine crippled old men whose houses were burned down around them by their own people while they were respectfully left in their beds instead of being abandoned to the approaching enemy. And I didn’t imagine the mothers who made it days, maybe even weeks into their journeys’ before realizing that they could not carry all of their small children any longer. And deciding to save the children they could, they left their smallest babies to die alone under a tree while the rest of the family carried on. But those are the stories Bryan heard yesterday.

I can’t stop crying about those babies. And I know my tears are mere raindrops in a roaring river. I find myself begging God to have please, please, please picked up every single one of those babies and cradled them in his arms while they died alone. I don’t know if I can bear it otherwise.

I find it so difficult to understand that this world is a place in which one day, while I was chopping an onion for dinner or sleeping dreamlessly or washing my baby’s hands, another woman was kissing her baby’s head and walking away to leave him under a tree to die alone. How is that possible? How could those things have happened simultaneously? Surely I should have felt her heart break into a million pieces in that moment too. One soul cannot contain that kind of pain; surely all of creation should stumble under that kind of burden. And yet she walked away and somehow, miraculously, my world did not so much as shudder. I didn’t know to stop chopping or sleeping or washing, to fall on my face on the floor and weep for her. For all of us.

In my grief and shock I have this reaction, this flicker of audacity to believe that surely, surely I would have been able to do something different. That, had I been in her place, some source of strength or store of resources would have been made available to me that were not available to her. That I would have found a way to save all my children. I comfort myself with the lie of thinking that I could ever understand and dare make different decisions in that hell. That I somehow love the child I pushed out of my body any differently than she does.  

Some days preparing to go to this place – to develop an unwritten language, teach people to read and write, help people process their trauma – these things feel too big for me. But sharing their stories is one thing that has never felt like too much. I have always been excited thinking about listening and giving voice, even if only in very small ways, to the suffering and injustice of the voiceless. If nothing else, I have thought, when I am not strong enough to try and heal or comfort or restore in any measure, I can listen and I can write.

But when I imagine sitting before that woman and hearing her voice and her story for the first time, while my children and hers play at our feet, I think, oh dear God, I am not sure I am even strong enough to do that.