ISSUES | A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH LASummer2017 | Page 8

Blow Out the Candles
I read the headlines of a news article today, of a boy – a boy who went to a theme park for
his birthday and died, crushed between two roller cars. He was eleven. Before his pubescent hairs
had even blossomed, before he had even unwrapped his birthday present, God decided to strangle
him out like some barely-budding weed. And I thought of his mother who had nursed him from
birth - who had plucked and placed her individual, jellybean hopes into his gushing soul. Who had
prayed for safety in his "going ins and his going outs" and who had cradled him for hours as he lay
sick in the cot. And the father, who might not have wanted to have a child when he had gotten
married to his childhood sweetheart, but when he saw the baby roll out of the hospital, he knew
there were glimmerings of something more within his son.
And on that bonny day of the child's eleventh birthday, they had entered that amusement
park with hope. They had taken for granted that his future was secure and safe - had he not
survived till today? Hadn't he shown a divine aptitude in his several-hundred dollar violin, clearly
revealing a master plan for this child's life? Had they not plotted how many grandchildren they
would have, and had they not weaved every aching thread of their souls upon that little child's
pulsing heart? It was his eleventh birthday, after all. What could possibly go wrong?
Then, after a day of hapless laughter and cotton candy, he died. There, the mother
frantically feeling for his heartbeat, trying to ignore the mangled, bloody splatterings upon his pale
skin. There, the father staring blankly at a limp body on the tracks, with a vague resemblance to
his son. “Happy birthday,” he found himself murmuring again and again. Noise to fill the vacuum.
Gone. Untouched violin, their grandchildren, Japanese birthday dinner, and tender prayers
- all evaporated in a single blunt, bloody stroke. Nobody knows him; nobody of significance will
remember. By tomorrow, a thousand giggling children will run over a clean patch of floor. His
corpse will be entombed in bland statistics, one of those “two people who die every second.”
Deaths don’t make much noise as they amble up our doorsteps, and they make even less as
they walk away. There’s no dramatic build-up or Ramin Djawadi soundtrack as the end