Last Sunday we watched a movie called Collateral Beauty. I highly
recommend the movie, especially if your heart has been broken by death of a
loved one.
I was touched by the beauty of the film, but it also brought up the grief I'm often too busy to feel… the loss of my father and brother in 2015. The depth of the sadness I have felt since
watching the movie has surprised me. Watching the movie also coincides with the time of year that I often feel blue, but this year the grief welled up inside of me…it was a loss due to a miscarriage I had less than a year after we moved to Nicaragua.
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| Joseph playing with nephew and niece, Elliot and Charlotte |
I always felt it was wrong or ungrateful to feel that grief because not long
after the miscarriage, we were blessed with Joseph being conceived and he is a such a joy to our family.
But as Mike reminded me yesterday, a loss is a loss…despite
the collateral beauty we have found in the life and love of our Joseph.
Many years ago, a delegation member asked me if Nicaraguan parents
felt the depth of sadness that parents in the U.S. felt after losing a child,
because many of these desperately poor parents had lost three, four, five
children. Some in birth, some in infancy,
some as wee ones and some as teens.
I responded – I thought – quite calmly in face of such an
insensitive question…or so I thought then.
Now, I think it was an honest question, because people of wealthier
nations…nations of power…stick their heads in the sands and think no one out
there feels what they feel. And at least
ASKING the question is place to begin.
Powerful nations drop bombs, send drones, send armies whenever
they think they are in danger…and all those bombs, drones, and soldiers kill
children. Children of parents, who, if not
dead themselves, have their hearts ripped out of their chests when they hold
their precious dead children in their arms.
Nawar Anwar al-Awlaki, 8 years old, died recently, and she was not the first.
Wealthy nations that abuse countries like Nicaragua and keep
them poor, or even keep their own people poor, hide from the truth that hunger
and disease kill children…or they refuse to accept their role in these children’s
deaths.
It is bad enough to lose a child to an illness with no cure
but to lose a child to a curable illness is beyond imagination as a parent
lowers their little child’s coffin into the ground.
I have been blessed to have in my life 3 wonderful sons and 2
amazing step children. They fill my life
with goodness that I cannot begin to express, and yet, today, I weep for that
little 12-week fetus I lost 21 years ago…
So in answer to that question posed to me long ago…Yes, no matter how many children they have lost, parents here feel
the same heart-wrenching grief that parents in the U.S. feel…maybe deeper
because keeping their children safe is completely out of their hands.
I wish everyone could understand the pain…not experience it
but understand it in order to stop the senseless deaths of children to war,
bombs, disease, hunger, violence, and poverty...then maybe
-Kathleen
