With respect, this is for Wayne Kubalsingh."Do the people who respect and feel for this man amount to a voice loud enough to shatter the shell of selfishness and insensitivity that encrusts the conscience of the nation? I'm sorry but I don't have that faith. If Dr Kublalsingh dies we become even darker as a people."Reply from a friend, Greg, after listening to Fr Clyde Harvey's comments on Dr Wayne Kubalsingh on Saturday night. (http://youtu.be/kE2meHGSpmM)
The loss, through death, of anyone, is shocking. The loss of a child can be worse. People think that children aren't supposed to die. It doesn't seem natural. That it is tragic. That the child never had an opportunity to experience a full life. That the child was innocent and didn't deserve to die.Sometimes people think other things. It was common to hear parents of children who had died on the wards of our public hospitals be told, surely in a false effort to comfort them, "allyuh could always make ah nex one."
One also heard this in the private nursing homes. How insensitive. Adults or children who lose a loved wife or husband or mother or father or daughter or son, don't have this built-in advantage.
If Dr Kubalsingh dies, who will comfort his mother?It is true that, "making a nex one" does have something comforting about it. That next child would surely have something to remind you of the lost one.If it has the same sort of genes of course.
You lose one child, you get another one. No big deal for some.What about those who can't make another one? And those who don't want another one? And those for whom the sadness and sense of desolation are too much?Who can only think of what might have been and of the smile that will not be seen any more?Or as someone wrote, the dead child who will "never steal a first kiss, I think of those things he's going to miss."It wasn't always so. One hundred and fifty years ago, the loss of a child was not the utter shock it may be for today's parents.
Death in infancy was a fact of life. Children died like peas. In 1841 in the United Kingdom, one out of every five infants died in their first year.Christian parents baptised their babies quickly.
Not only newborn babies died. In 1851, between the ages of ten and 14, five out of every thousand children died. In 1996 the figure for the same age group was one in every 5,000.
These were also the days when noted physicians prescribed sea-bathing as treatment for "delicate children" a euphemism for tuberculosis.
The treatment also included free exposure of the child's body to the bracing "sea breeze". Of late that sea breeze seems to be making a comeback as the latest treatment for children with asthma, a disease that some in T&T confuse with tuberculosis of the lungs.It has the same social conations in certain quarters: fear, denial and an unquestionable belief in the virtues of a flannel vest.
Tuberculosis was the real enemy. A third of all deaths in England arose from tuberculous disease.
Five out of six children who died in the Hospital des Enfants Malades in Paris were found at autopsy to have tuberculosis.Few parents are now intimately familiar with child death but some sort of social memory of those terrible days remains and the island is so small that everyone knows someone who knows somebody who knows about a child who died.Parents remain terrified of their children, even the older children, even the adult children, dying. Interestingly, children don't seem to fear death at all. Very ill children who are dying pick up the feelings and the view point about death from their parents. If their parents have a very negative or frightening view of death, this is what the child will feel
.
If the parents have a more positive, life-affirming, or spiritual view of death, then a dying child will feel more secure. All the dying child really cares about is to be with its parents. It is not afraid of death, like many adults are.They have often a natural trust or confidence in life and a very natural spirituality. It makes sense for them to pray or to call out for help. Letting go is not so hard for them. The pain they often suffer is worrying about their brothers and sisters and parents. They are the ones who may have difficulty letting go.
When it's time to really let a child or somebody go, you need to think about what is best for them in that moment, and not make them suffer more on your account.We are naturally afraid to let go. We may be afraid that by accepting death, it means we do not love our child or loved one. But beyond our attachment, there is still a pure love there.As Elizabeth K�bler-Ross says, "Your child may die, but real love doesn't die."