Journal Entry 12: The Sign of Christmas

This may be a difficult entry for some people to read because it deals with death. However it was really cathartic for me to write. So, with that disclaimer...

Last week there was a terrible car accident. I was in town doing research for my upcoming presentations on RNCS. Lucky, the co-head coach of our Tshikwarani YoungStars, was returning from Vuwani with six of new players he had registered. It was the first time he had traveled to Vuwani without me.

As they were coming home, the pickup truck or bakkie (the adopted Afrikaans word) they were traveling in was hit head on by a bus. The driver was pinned against the steering column and killed.

The police had to cut the door open to get Lucky out. He received some lacerations to his face and part of his ear was torn off, but stitched back on by doctors. When I asked him what he hit his head on, he nodded his head and said he couldn’t remember because there was too much blood in his eyes.

All of the boys were sitting in the bed of the bakkie. Some were badly injured: many had to receive stitches, one bashed his head on something - we thought he may be blind in his left eye but he has since recovered - and another severely broke his leg.

Saddest of all, Neo, our newest addition to the Under 19s, fell into a coma. He was taken to an intensive care unit in Polokwane, the capital of the Limpopo province, an hour and a half away. I heard his father traveled to the hospital to be with him. He died the next day. He was 15.

The service was that weekend. The community raised money for it and so did the soccer team. I was nervous to meet the parents, I didn’t know how they would receive me. But I met the father the day before the funeral; he was a very gentle man, though (understandably) withdrawn. This was the second child his family lost.

Our team played a large part in the funeral. I was asked to speak at the service, and the team, alongside Neo’s previous team, formed a “guard of honor” which escorted Neo’s casket and family out of their house. The teams continued to walk alongside the hearse as it slowly made it's way to the graveyard.

When we arrived, Neo’s family sat quietly under a tent, and the casket was placed upon two ropes above the burial site. The priest preached, some women cried and kids looked on.

Finally, it was time to lower the casket into the ground.

There is a type of crying in the world which, once you hear, you will not soon forget. It bears no conscience. Nor does it speak of the wound that bid it welcome, but points beyond itself, as a stone passes from sight in the ocean, towards what cannot be seen. When Neo was lowered into the ground, the child’s body pulled forth such a deep grief from his mother, it was as if I could hear an awesome and ancient apparatus groaning to life.

In that moment, I wish I could have disappeared and cried myself.

Death is different in Africa than in America. In the States, we’ve done such a good job at separating life from death, there’s a sense of entitlement to life in our bodies. That’s not the case in Africa. The relationship between life and death - or maybe I should say birth and death, has not been so obscured: that everything born into this world will die. Which is maybe why, after Neo’s death when people saw me sad, so many said in a compassionate tone, “Mashudu, you know, these things; they happen.”

…Before the accident, I’d bought a few cards I wanted to send back to the US. The cards were beautiful and bold; there was a real energy to them. They were made of an earthy, cream white paper and jet black ink brought out the negative space, which portrayed African animals gathered around a roundeval (a circular African hut) within which a child was cradled in his parent’s arms, with a soft incandescence surrounding the newborn. Above the roundeval was a star, which emanated the same golden light that bathed the child.

My friend was quick to point out how she liked the nativity scene portrayed in an African context. I, of course, had not noticed the biblical content, as I was intently looking at the elephant, lion and rhinoceros all eyeing a more centrally placed muskrat and thinking: seems to me that is one screwed muskrat.

But after the accident, as I was writing my parents, the picture on the card was not lost on me, nor the season in which this happened. Just as the plaintive cry of Neo’s Mom reminded me that there’s a place within all of us of deep pain, as I looked at the card I was reminded that there is a place of innocence, too.

A line from A Course In Miracles reads:

The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside yourself, but shining in the Heaven within.

Within this context, I could understand that the light surrounding the child is merely symbolic of the light "shining in the Heaven within". And that light is merely symbolic of the star above, whose rays extended to encompass everything in the picture. And therein lies our innocence, where I trust Neo is safe. As are we all.