No Words....

 

I’m crying. I just read in The Star about the 2 year old little girl who fell into a tub of water and drowned in her nursery. I saw the photo of her mother carrying her out of the clinic, her little body covered by a cloth but I spy her arm, discoloured and blue. The paragraph where it says (and I paraphrase), “The mother, uncontrollably distraught, carries her child out of the clinic and rushes into a waiting van” sets me off. I do not see how any mother can recover something like that. The little arm, the picture of grief on the mother’s face, the way the child lies over her mother’s shoulder - the way she would have in the morning the last time her mother carried her, alive.

 

I can’t bring myself to say no one is at fault. Why is the tub filled with water anyway when no one was using it? Why did the nursery guardians not take adequate measures of care and attention when they know they are dealing with precocious, inquisitive children, children who are helpless and naïve ….and innocent. Dead. Dead means gone forever, never to be warm again and held lovingly over and over again in parents’ arms. Dead means no more laughing, no more giggling, the child has no future, no wedding, no children of her own.

 

Dead sometimes means the mother dies too.