Death is among the most ordinary of experiences. After all everyone dies. In this sense it is no big thing. Indeed there is a view which holds that death should not concern us at all since, as the philosopher Epicurus long ago pointed out: “Death is nothing to us, since when we are death has not come, and when death has come we are not.”
Yet, in our heart of hearts, each of us fears the terrible blank wall of death.
We fear it so much that none of us cares to think about it even for a split second unless a death near us forces us at last to contemplate what the extinction of a human being really means.
It means total, irretrievable and heartrending loss. Life will not come again. Even that good Christian thinker, C S Lewis, referred to death as “the slamming of the door in your face and the sound of bolting on the inside.” There is a chant sung by the Dinka tribe in the Sudan which says it beautifully but finally:
The sun is born, and dies, and comes again
And the moon is born, and dies, and come again
And the stars are born, and die, and come again
And man is born, and dies, and does not come again.
The sorrow of the death of anyone we love stays with us forever. To some extent the passing of time heals but never entirely. I met a man, vigorous and not at all sentimental, and in the course of conversation he told me about his son who died very young forty years before. Even after all that time tears glistened in his eyes as he spoke to me.
Every person, but every child especially, represents such a miracle of potential achievement and creativity that his or her death is a huge catastrophe.
Think of an individual’s brain alone, infinitely superior to the most advanced computers now being constructed at a cost of millions of dollars each. And, after all, the brain in only a small part of the whole incalculable loss.
John Donne, the poet and priest, long ago perceived the truth that any person’s death diminishes each of us who remain alive. And, in the case of a child’s death, we are all diminished that much more because the loss of potential is so much greater.
All this talk of death is not because I am in morbid mood. In fact I remain enthralled by the timeless promise of the future and secure in the knowledge that those I love are for the time being well and happy.
I raise the subject because hardly a day passes without all of us being reminded of the truly appalling loss of life in road accidents. Worldwide, 1.2 million people annually die on the roads and up to 50 million are injured. Statistics available show that the top cause of death worldwide among persons 15-19 years old is road traffic injury. The World Health Organisation puts the global cost of road injuries at over US$500 billion per year. In Guyana we are guilty of more than our fair share of this worldwide slaughter and mayhem.
The terrible and terrifying horror of so many road deaths is an epidemic, a plague, a curse upon the nation. A child a week is being killed on the roads, many of them while playing or walking on the roadside. I think of my own children and grandchildren and shiver at the horror of any child’s death and death of such a senseless, unforgiving, mad and stupid kind.
There is a most beautiful poem by the Jamaican Lorna Goodison called “Song For My Son” which describes a mother bending over her son in bed:
I hover over his milk-stained breath
and listen for its rise
every one an assurance that he is alive
and if God bargains
I strike a deal with him,
for his life I owe you something, anything
but please let no harm come to him.
Every parent with a young child will recognize the deep and fearful love which draws out that unspoken daily cry to God:
for his life I owe you something, anything
but please let no harm come to him.
The author Aleksandar Hermon recently wrote about his baby daughter’s death in a story called Aquarium. It is the most harrowing account of a death I have ever read. In the aftermath, Aleksandar Hermon writes of him and his wife that the loss of their daughter is “now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.” That organ never disappears and never stops secreting its grief. The terrible loss of a child may be mentioned less and less but the parents never, never get over it.
No column of mine or anyone lasts for long in the memory of the reader.
But if ever I make a plea for one of my columns to be remembered for a little while I make the plea now. Whoever is reading – do not use the roads in any way that might kill.
From this day onwards drive that much slower, take many fewer chances, do not drink when you know you have to drive. Alcohol begets careless speed and speed begets death.
Above all, look out always where children are, look out with your mind and heart as well as your eyes. Look out for the children.
Do not run the slightest risk of killing a child. It will haunt you forever. The death of even one more child on our roads will diminish you, diminish me, spoil all our lives a little, place a stain on the nation that never really ever will rub out clean.
