How To Grieve For a Baby

The title of this post is rather misleading. I don't know how to grieve for a baby. Especially the banana-eating baby on the left, who happened to have suffered enormously. Babies don’t have to die of measles. Even in Africa. Even orphans. Even if they have HIV**. But that’s not what I’m writing about. Like I said, I don’t know how to grieve for a baby. But I made some rules regarding writing about it.

1. 20/20 hindsight is banned.
2. Also banned: the words “senseless” and “tragic” (even if they apply).
3. Also banned: the phrases “better place,” “for the best,” and “at least.”

So maybe this isn’t about grieving for a baby at all. Maybe it’s just about a baby.

Tsepong arrived at the orphanage almost exactly a year ago. This was before the babies started arriving at an alarming rate, at a time when each new arrival was an event, and when the smaller numbers, although not necessary to know and love them, at least made it easier. His mother had died. He and his older sister and brother were brought by two other female relatives, along with a garbage bag full of clothes for the three of them. The arrival of the new children was made all the more memorable by Tsepong’s spectacular diarrhea that day which managed to all but destroy his brother’s clothing, his crib and the carpet. So I bonded with him that first day over a sudsy bucket bath and a pair of clean pajamas. (This episode did not prove to be a habit with him, although he was remarkably, frighteningly, skinny).

In my mind he is dressed in white short-sleeved onesies, so these particular memories must have taken place in the dead of summer, because even in springtime their care-givers dress them like they are about to enter the tundra. I would sit him on the blue mat, with his legs splayed, his hands between his feet, and lie down on my stomach facing him. Unlike some of the others, he didn’t mind toppling over. He used to fall asleep in my arms in the late afternoon.

I was away for the month of July, trying my hand at organic farming and related arts and sciences. When I returned, he was walking. And no longer skinny. He was approaching a spherical state, really. Any time I entered the nursery at the orphanage, though far below my eye level, I always knew that the first little body attached to my leg like a barnacle was his. Even better, the moment I knelt down or scooped him up, the side of his warm head would connect to my collarbone, like a moth to a flame, a paperclip to a magnet. He made me think I had the best collarbone in the world. A magic collarbone. And with his soft hair tickling that bone of mine that still has the imprint of his skull, he would put his cool, moist smile to my neck, and greet me with the laugh that lived in his throat.



**I do not know what his HIV status was.