In Memory of Daniel

Daniel died today.  He was four years old, and down to skull and ribs and 6.2 kg of feverish flesh.  For three weeks we had tried everything we had to revive him, but we failed.  He suffered, a lot.  Dying of malnutrition is not comfortable.  He drank the proffered milk, right up to the last day, so I think he felt hunger even though almost everything that went in was vomited back out.  More than everything that went in came out, he heaved his life out, so that he slipped downward, losing ground daily in an inexorable march towards not-being.  Ironically I suppose, I had requested the whole family to be present today, father and brother and sisters and mother, to consider transferring him to a referral hospital in Kampala. But when I arrived this morning to a ward of chaos (39 patients instead of the normalish 23-25 . . ), Daniel's father informed us that he was much worse.  He was the first patient Heidi and I evaluated, and we found the family packing up all their scraps of cloth and pans and pills into a sack to go home, though Daniel was arousable at that point, and able to swallow a few spoons of milk.  We discussed referral, but his father pointed out that he would never reach, he would die en route, which was true.  I thought they just wanted to go home to die.  It was agonizing to agree that we had failed him, that there was nothing else to offer.  An hour later they were still sitting on the bed though, as ambivalent as I was, not sure if they should begin their homeward trek or wait until he died.  Then he began to convulse, and have a fever, and we all agreed that we should try a small amount of IV fluid and Quinine.  At least the diazepam for the seizures would perhaps make him more comfortable.  Hospice care should not be a part of nutrition therapy.  Anyway he died at 12:47 pm, still hot with fever, but no longer struggling, vacant-eyed and stiff.  Heidi and Olupa wrapped his body in cloths while the family bustled to collect everything else and his mother began the traditional song-like cry of grief, and escalating wail of sorrow.  Finally Heidi and I slipped into the store room and shut the door and had a good cry ourselves.  When you see a child daily for weeks, when you ask your kids to pray for him by name every night, when you have to be present and helpless through the final agony, well, it is brutal.  

Though this is Daniel's story, not ours, we are listening, looking for meaning in the way our lives intersected briefly.  Is this a clue, to where God wants to tell the story of redemption?  Daniel's suffering?  Our powerlessness, our failure to save him?  No answers today, just a tiny bundle of cloth and a spasm of lament.  Any angels escorting him to the place of no tears did so unseen, as we emerged from the ward to a sky grey with spitting rain.  Faith, not substance, all that we have this afternoon.