The other day, I saw a dead body for the first time. It was someone in the hospital who had passed away and had been carefully wrapped in a sheet, laid on an army stretcher, and placed in a back hallway until friends could come carry him out. When I first saw him, Miss Vero offered a quick explanation and carried on with her work. Jean Berna, a friend of ours who was with me, asked a couple of questions, then he, too, moved on to a new subject.
A little later, another friend of mine walked in and saw the man. She gasped a little and asked who he was, then let out a quick laugh. It wasn’t the kind of laugh that comes from hearing a funny joke. It was the kind of laugh that comes with hands thrown out both directions in a gesture of helplessness. The kind that says, “Ha! What could I do.”
I was surprised at how casually everyone handled this situation, and thought maybe death does not effect Haitians in the same way it does me. A little later in the day, I realized I was wrong.
I was in the truck with Jean Berna talking about the rainy season, when all of a sudden, he let out a little laugh. The same kind of laugh I heard from my friend in the hospital. “Ha, did you see that man that died in the hospital?”
“Yeah, I did,” I answered back.
“We are nothing,” he laughed again. “Only God is something.” He went on to explain himself saying that when we die, we don’t know anything and in this life we are very small. “But one day, I think, in the last generation, God will take my body from under the earth,” he added again with a smile on his face. It was a sobering conversation to have less than a month after the earthquake.
As he spoke I thought of friends I’d talked to just days before the earthquake and will never see again. I thought of a little girl in the orphanage who lost her father, four bothers, and a sister. And I thought of my close friend still grieving the loss of her siblings. And I had to wonder if the casual attitude toward death isn’t an example of Haitians being unaffected, but instead evidence of how deeply they have been affected by all that they’ve seen and experienced.
