Scouts out!

On the subject of Boston yesterday, LTC Bateman Explains It All For You



As we would have said in the infantry, fucking-A right, sir.

Peace of mind

Couldn't help thinking that - as terrible as yesterday was in Boston - I worked a regular workday and then bitched at the traffic on the way home as if it was the most irritating fucking thing in the world.

And really...isn't that what people usually do when others suffer a tragedy? Sure, we think about those who suffered, if we are compassionate souls we pity them, if we are human we worry about the potential for harm to ourselves, selfish creatures that we are.



And then we get on with whatever we've been doing.

The trivialities of our lives don't stop mattering to us because someone else has suffered unspeakable horror.

Yesterday three people were killed and some 130 were injured by bombs in Boston. But thirty people were killed and over 100 injured by bombs in Afghanistan and fifty were killed and over 200 injured by a car bombings in Iraq. And hundreds, probably thousands more died or were maimed in silly, pointless little domestic tragedies; car accidents, slips and falls, chokings, heart attacks.

Every single one was a horror and a tragedy to the people left behind. The parents without a child, the children bereft of parents, the couples parted by death, the grandparents never to know their grandchildren, the friends and lovers and acquaintances shattered by sudden loss. Every one of those lights that went out yesterday was a little universe to the dead, and part of the universe that they and those they knew and loved had created around them. And every one of those little universes was shattered into fragments, some to wobble on, some to drift away into darkness never to shine again.



And so it has always been, and so it will always be. Some of us will die. Some will live, and go on. And the contrast between those deaths and our lives invites all sorts of reflection, speculation, accusation, and deliberation.

The only difference between the "always has been" and today, it seems to me, is that we now have these instant outlets for all that speculation and accusation. And that many of those thoughts, as our thoughts always have been and always will be, are foolish and vain and contumacious and silly. Ed at Gin and Tacos puts it better than I can:

"The internet and 24-hour cable news environment overwhelms us with "grief porn" in response to events like Monday's bombing. It encourages us not only to express great sadness but to do so publicly. It's not enough to spectate; we have to be part of the chorus of prayers and tears. We've always been less than enlightened thinkers as a nation. Today, though, we have a window into our half-baked thought processes and speculative "journalism" encouraging us to join them in a leap to conclusions. We have every opportunity to say things and very little encouragement to think before doing it. The exhibition of bile and stupidity that we see online is evidence that we could all benefit from a quieter and more reflective response to the horrible things the world throws at us."

Boston suffered a deadly day yesterday.

But not only deadly day. And the deadliness of Boston's day does not mean that the commonalities and trivialities and normal business of our own are worthless, or inconsequential, or that we somehow need to stop what we're doing and join the keening of those whose universe was lost.



Our lives go on while others' end. We are changed and yet the same, our existence no weighter or more trivial than they were the day before yesterday. And I don't know what that says about us, other than that human nature is and always has been the best and worst of the things we are and do.

We are our own angels.



And, alas, our own devils.

Yun-yun's Story: The House Carpenter

They had not been at sea two weeks
I'm sure it was not three
When this poor maid began to weep
And she wept most bitterly

O do you weep for your gold, he said
Your houses, your land, or your store?
Or do you weep for your house carpenter
That you never shall see anymore

I do not weep for my gold, she said
My houses, my land or my store
But I do weep for my poor wee babe
That I never shall see anymore

They had not been at sea three weeks
I'm sure it was not four
When in their ship there sprang a leak
And she sank to rise no more

What hills, what hills are those, my love
That are so bright and free
Those are the hill of Heaven, my love
But not for you and me

What hills, what hills, are those, my love
That are so dark and low
Those are the hills of Hell, my love
Where you and I must go

for May Baoxin Gellar

Yun-yun's Story: Cock-crow

Wednesday night was awful. Little Baoxin didn't sleep and neither did we, dreading the morning and the return to Guangzhou Children's Hospital. After another terrifying cab ride - the intellectual concept of "lane" appears to be nonexistant in south China and the only traffic regulation is "show no fear" - we were again inside the tile warren, again in a crowded waiting area, again before a doctor, this time the neurologist, who would determine the fate of our child and us.
--
This time the physician performed actual neurological tests, manipulating her limbs, stimulating her to crawl and stand and noting the difficulties. The original diagnosis was modified to "unspecified brain injury resulting in significant mental/physical impairment" or what in the bad old days we called "mental retardation".
--
We cried. Our hearts went out to her. But we couldn't possibly take her home, not with everything else in our past, memories of a daughter lost and worries for our own home and family. We had decided, in the dark hours of Wednesday night, that if the diagnosis confirmed a brain injury to turn her back, even thought it might mean coming home without a child. But we also knew that in doing so we probably condemned her to a life of barely surviving in the cheerless institution we had thought to take her from. We felt like heartless Judases but, in choosing, chose ourselves and our family over her good. That is a cruel choice, and nothing can disguise it. We deliberately chose our own welfare over hers, and we will have to live with that for the rest of our lives.

Having made that choice, the rest of Thursday was an extended frenzy of paperwork and phone calls. First we were told that she would go back to the orphanage that day, then that evening. We were told that we could not move to the non-special-needs category and that it would not be possible to complete the adoption in our original time period (and our travel dates were not mobile!). Then, late in the evening, with Mojo and Baoxin in exhausted sleep, Rob the guide called to say that the nannies had just got in and couldn't be at the hotel before midnight. In one of my most foolish decisions I asked him to put off the handover until the following morning.

Baoxin didn't sleep more than an hour that night, and poor Debra ended up sitting up with her on her chest, feeling every little movement, the pulse of that tiny, injured heart against hers, hating it, hating herself, hating life and the Gods of Children for their unrelenting cruelty. She passed a night so bleak I cannot imagine it, and cannot describe it. But I mention it so that you can imagine for yourself, if you can, those long, dark hours of bottomless sorrow.

The next morning we went back into the city, to a warrenlike hotel where we returned her. She was overjoyed to see her nannies, they crying out cheerfully when she appeared. The cab ride back to the White Swan was sad but not as bitter as we had imagined. We had made the decision and were willing to live with it. Another referral had been mentioned. We were starting to hope again.

But, of course, Fate had a last dagger hidden. I went to the "Garden Pool" to swim and decompress and returned to the room to find my wife all in pieces.

"Rob called" she sobbed "He says he was at the nannies' hotel. Says she was doing all the things they said: walking, talking. Says he wnts us to come and see, that it's our last chance."

I thought about all the possibilities, about our hopes that this sweet little girl had fooled us all, that we had a chance for a full and happy life, that the doctors were wrong. And then of the awful chance that these small things were all she could do, that we would spend the next twenty years hoping for a flower that would be forever a bud, worrying about every setback, every low grade, every speech problem or coordination difficulty.

We never saw her again.

I am crying now, as I write this, for our little mei-mei, for the lost love and hopes we had, for the little girl back asleep in her crib in Liangjiang. We still love you and hope for you. I'm sorry, Mei-mei, that we weren't big enough to be what you needed for a fuller life and a brighter hope. I will be sorry until my own life is over.

Next: The House Carpenter

Yun-yun's Story: a Tragedy in Two Acts

So I suppose that most of you reading this, as we did when we left Portland for the interminable flight across the Pacific on Friday the 14th of September thought that we would be returning with the little Girl from Liangjiang, Lian Baoxin. It was with her referral in hand we arrived in the dog's-mouth heat of Guangzhou city and the overpriced luxus accomodations of the White Swan Hotel therein.
--
That was the plan all along. We had read up on her "special need" (polydactyly), learned about her home town and her province, bought clothes for her and anticipated meeting and seeing her for the first time. Emotionally, she was "mei-mei".
--
And so the first couple of days were really just meaningless. I could describe the old colonial enclave of Shamian Island for you, or talk about the sights and sounds of southeast China, but that would be about another subject, and this story is, purely and simply, a tragedy.
--
I suppose that human nature prevents us from seeing ourselves as players in a tragedy, from seeing tragedy as something that happens to us rather than actors in a play or on a screen. But suddenly there you are, your chest breaking open with the sobs you can't keep in while you know that, even as you cry your tears are vain. That the Wheel of Suffering is exact, and swerves not a hair, sparing no one and nothing. That you will be called upon to receive the fullest measure of pain to the satisfaction of the Giver and not the capacity of the Gifted. And so our calvary began Monday morning when a little girl in a white onesie was carried into the "gotcha" room at the Civil Affairs Building in Guangzhou.
--
It was a brutally quick handoff. The nannies appeared, gave us a quick precis on her likes and schedule, passed her to us and departed. We were informed that in Liangjiang dialect the "xin" in her name was pronounced "yun", "Baoyun", and her orphanage nickname was "Yun-yun". Xin or yun, she sobbed equally on Mojo and myself, comfortless amid the crowd of wailing, babbling, cooing and crying families. For the rest of the morning she lay on Mojo's breast, clinging to her with her tiny simian hands and feet in a desperate search for human contact.
--
The next two days passed in a confused crescendo of parental worry punctuated by official paperwork. We, of course, were helpless. Clueless. Utterly unsure of why this tiny human seemed so inert. We tried to make sense of the problems, tried to reason ourselves into some rational order. Of course she was hurt. Traumatized, bereft, probably ill...no wonder she couldn't raised herself up from the prone, roll over, stand from sitting, vocalize except for crying. On Tuesday we noticed white lesions on her tongue, which the White Swan "doctor" diagnosed as something to do with "food sitting in her mouth" and prescribed some sort of hideous 18th-Century iodine swab we dutifully applied to her tongue twice a day.
But even after meeting the nannies again on Tuesday and desperately trying to find reasons for her intertia, by Wednesday afternoon we were near panic. This was not the active toddler we were told to expect. This was more like a six-month-old, and a weak and sick one at that.

So Wednesday night we called "Rob", the agency guide-cum-fixer, and told him we wanted to go to the Guangzhou Children's Hospital. This hollow, ringing porcelin tile sanitarium is a medical facility in the Graham Greene tradition of southeast Asia, full of immense, dimly-lit halls and entire mendicant families huddled around their sick offspring. There, in an open examination cubicle, an appropriately 19th Century-white-gowned and -masked medical person peered at our sagging daughter, picked her up and set her down on her feet and directed Mojo to do the same. She felt the baby's leg, went back to her desk and started writing, saying something to Rob.

"She say something is wrong with the baby's braid." I thought I heard Rob say.

"Braid?" I was stunned "Rob, this child has no hair whatsoever. What is she talking about?"

"No, no..." Rob replied "...something is wrong with brain."

--

Moments later we had the adoption agency's rep in Beijing on the phone. Her English is notably better, and she explained eaxctly what the doctor had said:

"She says your baby has cerebral palsy."

--

Mojo burst out sobbing, and I stared at the phone in sick disbelief.

Next: Before the cock crows shall ye deny me.