they’re better off now

A child died in the orphanage. What people said afterwards might have been the same thing I would have said, before. My question is: who actually is better off that a handicapped abandoned child died? her? or us?

Waiting for the train in Brașov, Romania.

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One of the children died. She was seven years old and in the TB ward. She wasn’t one of ours, but I knew her and had seen her Friday before she died sometime that night.

One of the remarks I heard was that she is better off now. Possibly, but I’m glad she wasn’t one of ours. After you spend so much time with a child you don’t want them to die, whether they’d be “better off” or not. I do agree that sometimes there is a desperate situation that you wish could somehow be made better. I stand over the cribs of the seriously retarded children and am at a loss to know how to pray: for them or for me. The one thing I know would make them happy would be a mother and father. Even the worst handicap is made livable if someone who cares about you. But death as a release from suffering? What suffering? Being handicapped or being left alone?

A seven-year-old with a mental age of 4 months doesn’t lie there wishing she were dead. If her mind works at a four-month-old level then that’s how she thinks: like a baby, and no baby wishes she was dead because she can’t feed himself and wears a diaper.

What these children do think about, I know, is that it would be really nice if someone would pick them up and walk around with them. Any of them that are distressed will quiet down if I pick them up and carry them around a while. They only start crying again when I put them down. I don’t know that thoughts about their situation enter their minds: probably none because they’re babies and children. The simple truth is that no baby or child likes to be left alone for hours (or days!) at a time.

When a person says “they’re better off now” (my sermon is almost over!) they’re really saying two things: (1) The child is not mine (because no one would never say that of their own child) and (2) these children require too much: caring for someone who has no hope of getting better is pointless. To that I say, “But they don’t know that! All they want is have someone hold them.”

The mercy is that they have no idea that no one wants them. Their little minds only deal in facts: I’m hungry: I want to be fed. I’m tired: I want to go to sleep. I’m awake: I want to play. I’m alone: I want to be held.

“They’re better off now” is a lie. The ugly truth, deep down there, that we will not admit, is that we’re better off now.

I’m better off if they’re alive.

They’re better off if I hold them.