Grief

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SOME THINGS CAN ONLY BE PREVENTED

She looked like a little angel, fast asleep. I held her hand and prayed desperately, ‘God, please, please let her live.’ I willed her to live as tears streamed down my cheeks while the ambulance screamed its way through the serpentine traffic of rush hour Mumbai.

Our family had been preparing for a big Christmas. Relatives were down from England and they had brought the works, so we could have an English Christmas! The house was decorated, the Christmas tree lit up, the table laid to bring in the much awaited celebration. My Children 10 and 4, were all excited and looking forward to the best Christmas ever! December 24 it was.

My husband heard a familiar voice yell his name. We rushed to look out the window but our friend was already bounding up the three storeys to our house taking the stairs two at a time. Sensing the urgency, I flung our door open and began running down towards him.

‘Come quick,’ he panted. Megha fell off the terrace of her building. Both our eyes popped with shock. ‘What? Megha? Our Megha? Off the terrace of her three storey building?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Please hurry!’

Megha’s parents and we were close friends. Sam and his wife Suja were one of the gentlest couples I have ever known. Soft spoken, composed, and always willing to reach out to help someone in need. Megha was their only child. They had been planning her admission to school. She would close 3 in February.

We were too dazed to talk on our way to the hospital. Thoughts raced through our minds, but we dared not voice them. I prayed desperately that this was just a dream from which we would soon wake up. Our bike zoomed into the hospital driveway just as the ambulance was at the exit. I jumped off the bike and into the ambulance while my husband followed on his bike. I saw her lying there, unscathed externally, but battling for her life as Sam’s doctor-brother artificially pushed air into her comatose lungs using a paediatric ambu bag. Being a nurse myself, I gave him that nurse-doctor look of enquiry and the grim look he returned said it all. I quietly took her hand in mine and began to pray, begging God to let her live.

It took an hour to reach the critical care hospital, winding through traffic that paid no attention to the screaming of the ambulance siren, not because no one cared but because the traffic in Mumbai is just like that, choc-a bloc, day or night.

But it was too late! They tried everything to revive her, but her little heart had succumbed to the immense impact of the fall her tiny body took from the terrace of the three storey building where she had lived the almost three years of her too short life.

Her doctor-uncle stayed by her side, fighting back his tears. I went out to break the news to Sam. As he saw me emerge from the emergency room he read my hopeless face. It was over.
‘She’s gone, Sam,’ I said simply, and we both wept. Sam must have expected this, because he knew what had happened, I didn’t.

It was Christmas Eve, and everyone was readying for Christmas. It was routine for the neighbor children to take Megha to play each evening, so this evening was no different. They all loved her, and why not? She was a living doll; not yet three, she was as cute as a toddler could be; fair skinned, with curly black hair and large dark eyes like her mother. She was shy, yet loved by all; a little china doll so cuddly and cute. The children usually played in the building compound, but not today. Today was special; they were not going down to play but they were going up to the terrace to get ready for the New Year Eve party the residents were planning. The children were noisily practicing their item numbers and skits when Megha’s mum popped by to see how safe her daughter was. She saw the terrace full of almost all the children from the building and there were several younger than Megha. So she returned to her third floor home where she had been chatting about mundane things with her mother.

A few minutes later, one of the children came and told Suja that Megha had fallen. Suja ran up the stairs thinking her baby-girl had fallen on the terrace and maybe bumped her head or scraped her knee. Not in her wildest dreams did she think of running down the stairs to pick Megha up from there. How could she? Accidents happen to other people! A chill ran through Suja’s spine as the children told her that Megha had fallen off the terrace to the bottom of the building. Now she turned and ran downstairs, heart racing, only to see the building watchman carrying her limp daughter and walking up the stairs as fast as he dared with an unconscious child cradled in his arms. While Suja got into an autorickshaw and made the rounds; first to find Sam in his Pharmacy store and then to get a preliminary check with Sam’s doctor brother from where they took her first to a private nursing home which did not admit her because it did not have the facilities to treat her, and finally, to the largest hospital in the area which also was out of its depth to handle a case as critical as this, so recommended that she be taken to a critical care hospital which was an hour’s journey into the city; Megha’s life ebbed away as her tiny heart failed to handle the intense trauma her frail body had suffered.

Accidents are always waiting to happen. Most people learn life lessons from them, but for some it is too late. In this case Megha had to pay the price for inadequate security measures taken by building authorities to keep children away from open terraces or provide adequate adult supervision to ensure their safety. Co-operative societies have rules for cleanliness and rules for hawkers and salespersons entering the buildings; rules for parking and rules for noise nuisance, but what about the safety of its children? Shouldn’t co-operative societies have stringent rules for safety? Why was the building terrace door from where Megha fell kept locked after the accident? Would it not have prevented her death if that precaution was taken earlier? I wonder!

I am a great believer in predestination, and all knowing God who knows the end of my days before one of them came to be. But predestination is not the same as destiny. Destiny is fatalistic and preempts my hand in determining the path my life takes. Predestination, on the other hand, says that God, Who is all knowing knows the choices we will make before we make them, and He knows the path we will chalk out for our lives as a result of those choices. Is this why, a month after Megha died, her mother who was cleaning out the satchel Megha carried to play school which should have actually contained just a snack box and water bottle also had a lone book in it? Is this why the book was titled ‘Life After Death’ by Gordon Lindsay? Is this why there was an article in the book written by a lady who had a vision of heaven where she saw toddlers in heaven who were so happy that if their parents saw how happy they were, they would never wish for them to return to earth just to take away their own grief and pain of losing them?

Sam and Suja claim that during this time of loss, they had felt a peace beyond understanding, and when they found this book in her bag it was as if the all knowing God whom they call Jesus was saying, ‘I know what you are going through and I knew this would happen. I hope this book will show you that your child is Mine now and I will take good care of her until she is reunited with you, when your cross the bridge to yonder.’ They say the peace that ensued, not only took them through that time but also prevented them from becoming overprotective parents to their two children who were born a few years after Megha left them to go to her real home in heaven.

I remember that when we went to break the news to Suja on our return from the hospital, Sam and I had no words to tell her. He just hugged her and wept as she cried uncontrollably. I held both of them and prayed that Jesus would give them the ‘Peace which passes understanding’ that is the only thing that keeps His children in moments like these when our mind is blown because we cannot understand the why but we just trust and wait for the Who to take us by the hand and lead us through. I am certain that He led them through their valley of pain with His Everlasting arms underneath them, holding them up until they could stand again!

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