Tales of bitter loss and hope
December 24, 2005
Globe and Mail, by Stephanie Nolen
And Mpho picked it up — but on the way home, she took a detour to a little shop. She spent the whole thing — a small fortune for a child in Alexandra — on candy. And then she went to her school, and gave sweets to everyone. And for one day, she was the most popular girl in school. Magdalene was furious, of course — but everybody had to laugh a little at Mpho’s determined extravagance.
I was going to tell you many more things about Mpho. My editors and I had plans for me to write regularly, beginning this week, about her and her family, as a way of helping Globe readers to understand what AIDS is doing to
My editor wondered whether they were the right family for this kind of project, because the disease has already cost them so much. But I argued that they were — because at this point there are so few families unscathed, so many already struggling in all these ways.
And because, as I have come to know them over the past three years, I have been so taken with their scrappy courage, with Mpho tottering to school on stick-thin legs because she didn’t want to miss anything: they were good people for you to get to know, I thought. But they were gone, before I could get even one word written down.
Mpho died last month, at the age of 12. Before she got to be in her school Christmas pageant, before she got to have a boyfriend. She died after fighting HIV for all of her 12 years.
The call came on a Friday night — my friend Rosina, an extraordinarily brave nurse who runs the support group and through whom I first met this family, called to say that Mpho had died. And that her aunt Ellen was taken to a hospice for palliative care, at this point too sick to stand.
A week later, we went to the funeral in Alexandra. Granny Magdalene — who buried her daughter, and now a granddaughter, and saw another funeral coming soon — looked at us and said simply: "I’m lost. I’m lost." Mpho’s brother Paul, 14, and with just one last close relative left alive, scuffed among the crowds, not meeting anybody’s eyes, but much too brave to cry. At the Alexandra graveyard, there was a crisis: There is no space left, not space for the coffin of even a frail and wasted 12-year-old.
In the end, they reopened the grave of Mpho’s mother, dug down deeper and buried her daughter on top. The night before the funeral, a huge storm swept through the township, and very nearly collapsed the plastic tent where the neighbour ladies and family friends were chopping vegetables for the community feast that accompanies a funeral here.
Rosina gave a bittersweet laugh: "That’s Mpho," she said, about the tearing wind. "She’s so angry."
I’m angry too. I feel a white liquid rage at
And I’m furious at the way Mpho had to live and die. If Mpho and her family didn’t live in such squalor, without access to jobs or good health care or nutritious food, she might have been far healthier.
If the adults in her life — particularly the male sexual partners of her mother, aunts and granny — had practised safer sex, she would have had better people to care for her, or perhaps never been infected at all.
I’m furious that AIDS in
And I’m bitterly angry with myself. I meet dozens of people in the last days of their lives each week in this job, and I keep a tough layer of callus between me and the world. But Mpho got underneath it — and I am enraged that I did not, could not, do more to keep her alive.
In truth, I did not think she could die, although Rosina — wise Rosina, who works all day at the coalface of the pandemic — told me quietly, as we made pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner, that the end was coming quickly for Mpho.
Nonsense, I said: Mpho is on ARVs. I wouldn’t let myself believe that anyone who had access to treatment could die: I meet so very many people who are sick that, if I am to function here at all, I need to believe that treatment, if somehow they can just get access to treatment, will keep them alive.
At Mpho’s funeral, I joined the stout, weary grannies who washed the dishes in tubs in the yard, and helped in the line of women who dished out mashed pumpkin and beetroot. Every third or fourth face I looked into — the children from Mpho’s class, the neighbours — bore the signs of HIV. I have persuaded myself of the miracle of anti-retroviral treatment, though of course it does not always work and it only forestalls the inevitable, because to believe otherwise is to know that all of these people will imminently be gone too.
Mpho deserved that forestalling and so much more. And I think what makes me most angry is the loss: she was a crafty, clever, sharp, sparkly kid. Now she’s one more AIDS statistic for
Maybe she would have been a doctor, or a teacher — and maybe she would just have been a kid who got a boyfriend and tussled with him in the township streets.
We will never know what we’ve lost.