Our Shells of Being
by Melissa Dribben
FEBRUARY 2, 2010 TAGS:
We had gone for a walk in search of breakfast, my Haitian friend Luc and I, when we met the body that one of his neighbors had left behind.
It was lying on the sidewalk in a bed of crumbled concrete.
We stopped for a moment and stared.
“My God,” Luc said. What other response could there be?
I knew before I left home to cover the earthquake’s aftermath that I’d be seeing corpses on the street. I expected to be horrified. But this shell of a human being, turgid and shiny as a plastic doll, looked more like a prop in a B horror film than anything resembling a sentient form. The middle-aged woman who had been at one with this body - felt its pleasures, tended to its needs and used it to move through the world - had died six days earlier.
The integument we came across was so completely disconnected from life, I had to force myself to realize that it was once occupied by a person.
The horror I felt was for the tens of thousands of Haitians who had survived by pure chance and now grieved amid the chaos.
Luc’s elderly mother-in-law, his sister-in-law and nephew had come through without a scratch. Twenty years before, Luc had started to build a home on a hillside in Port-au-Prince. There were no fears back then of the ground veering and swerving like an out-of-control car, but he is a thorough man.
“When I do something, I make sure it’s done right,” he said, boasting (deservedly) that he’d had his construction workers put in triple the normal number of rebars to reinforce the concrete walls and ceiling. I’d never heard of a rebar before - these thick hairpin-shaped rusted iron rods buried in the gray masonry, keeping Third World homes erect.
Throughout the crumbled city, you could see them now, fractured bones poking up out of the mountains of broken homes. Or leaning into the street like bent pipe cleaners.
Luc’s house had withstood the 7.1 tremor, rolling with the seismic waves and holding its ground. But all around, his neighbors’ homes had cracked and collapsed.
His nephew, Emmanuel, said he knew the woman down the street, although he could not remember her name. She’d been cooking on that Tuesday evening at 4:53. Her husband, two children and a friend were standing on the wrought iron balcony.
The woman’s family and friends were found early on, Emmanuel told us. But her body remained buried for nearly a week. Now, somehow, she was out in the open sun. Had someone dug her out? Had the aftershocks loosened the rubble to expose her? Had scavenging dogs pawed their way in to find her?
Who knew? And what did it matter?
She’d quit this world the instant that her walls caved in, rendering her home and her body uninhabitable.
Although I don’t believe in God, heaven or hell, I have witnessed the transition between life and death and sensed the ineffable coming and going of souls.
I’ve given birth to three babies, trying and failing to fathom how each pregnancy suddenly ended and my children’s new lives began. I’d also cared for my mother and father at home in their final months, days, minutes. I’d watched them approach the borderline. The closer they got, the less recognizable they became. By the time their hearts stopped beating, I had no desire to hold the hollow skin they had shed.
My lack of faith leaves me at a loss to name just what it is that used to occupy their bodies. To explain love and evil and every other force carried by each whispery breath. But from what I saw, Haiti’s earthquake leaves believers just as perplexed.
For natural catastrophes level the devout and the heathen with an even hand.
During my 10 days in Haiti, I watched Luc, a nurse practitioner, volunteer in a Catholic hospital in Port-au-Prince. Three-quarters of the hospital’s buildings were destroyed in the quake. In the maternity ward, three women had just delivered. One was in labor. Scores of dead patients, nurses and support staff lay trapped in the rubble, the hospital director told me.
They were able to pull only one out, a man who worked in the supply room. But by then, the on-site morgue, which had room for 90 bodies, was full. I was given a tour.
The staff worker lay on a stretcher on the floor. Like the woman’s body on the street, this corpse was gruesome, but no longer human. It looked more like a balloon from a nightmarish Thanksgiving Day parade than even a Madame Tussaud waxed figure. Inflated by the bacterial gasses trapped inside, the limbs stuck out oddly. The skin had mottled to a watercolor wash of blues and browns, yellows and purples. The tongue protruded.
In the refrigerator case, kept cool by a gas generator, the city’s archbishop lay on a steel shelf. In the chilled air, his dignity had been preserved, for the time being. His pale blue oxford shirt was blood-stained, his face expressionless. On the shelves above and below lay the bodies of women, one of whom was his sister.
The staff member’s body would be removed and buried quickly.
But the archbishop’s remains would make one last appearance. One week later, partially restored by a mortician, the body would be placed in an elegant coffin, lid open, so that survivors who believed in heaven could bid farewell to the man who was already long gone.
Melissa Dribben is a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
It was lying on the sidewalk in a bed of crumbled concrete.
We stopped for a moment and stared.“My God,” Luc said. What other response could there be?
I knew before I left home to cover the earthquake’s aftermath that I’d be seeing corpses on the street. I expected to be horrified. But this shell of a human being, turgid and shiny as a plastic doll, looked more like a prop in a B horror film than anything resembling a sentient form. The middle-aged woman who had been at one with this body - felt its pleasures, tended to its needs and used it to move through the world - had died six days earlier.
The integument we came across was so completely disconnected from life, I had to force myself to realize that it was once occupied by a person.
The horror I felt was for the tens of thousands of Haitians who had survived by pure chance and now grieved amid the chaos.
Luc’s elderly mother-in-law, his sister-in-law and nephew had come through without a scratch. Twenty years before, Luc had started to build a home on a hillside in Port-au-Prince. There were no fears back then of the ground veering and swerving like an out-of-control car, but he is a thorough man.
“When I do something, I make sure it’s done right,” he said, boasting (deservedly) that he’d had his construction workers put in triple the normal number of rebars to reinforce the concrete walls and ceiling. I’d never heard of a rebar before - these thick hairpin-shaped rusted iron rods buried in the gray masonry, keeping Third World homes erect.
Throughout the crumbled city, you could see them now, fractured bones poking up out of the mountains of broken homes. Or leaning into the street like bent pipe cleaners.
Luc’s house had withstood the 7.1 tremor, rolling with the seismic waves and holding its ground. But all around, his neighbors’ homes had cracked and collapsed.
His nephew, Emmanuel, said he knew the woman down the street, although he could not remember her name. She’d been cooking on that Tuesday evening at 4:53. Her husband, two children and a friend were standing on the wrought iron balcony.
The woman’s family and friends were found early on, Emmanuel told us. But her body remained buried for nearly a week. Now, somehow, she was out in the open sun. Had someone dug her out? Had the aftershocks loosened the rubble to expose her? Had scavenging dogs pawed their way in to find her?
Who knew? And what did it matter?
She’d quit this world the instant that her walls caved in, rendering her home and her body uninhabitable.
Although I don’t believe in God, heaven or hell, I have witnessed the transition between life and death and sensed the ineffable coming and going of souls. I’ve given birth to three babies, trying and failing to fathom how each pregnancy suddenly ended and my children’s new lives began. I’d also cared for my mother and father at home in their final months, days, minutes. I’d watched them approach the borderline. The closer they got, the less recognizable they became. By the time their hearts stopped beating, I had no desire to hold the hollow skin they had shed.
My lack of faith leaves me at a loss to name just what it is that used to occupy their bodies. To explain love and evil and every other force carried by each whispery breath. But from what I saw, Haiti’s earthquake leaves believers just as perplexed.
For natural catastrophes level the devout and the heathen with an even hand.
During my 10 days in Haiti, I watched Luc, a nurse practitioner, volunteer in a Catholic hospital in Port-au-Prince. Three-quarters of the hospital’s buildings were destroyed in the quake. In the maternity ward, three women had just delivered. One was in labor. Scores of dead patients, nurses and support staff lay trapped in the rubble, the hospital director told me.
They were able to pull only one out, a man who worked in the supply room. But by then, the on-site morgue, which had room for 90 bodies, was full. I was given a tour.
The staff worker lay on a stretcher on the floor. Like the woman’s body on the street, this corpse was gruesome, but no longer human. It looked more like a balloon from a nightmarish Thanksgiving Day parade than even a Madame Tussaud waxed figure. Inflated by the bacterial gasses trapped inside, the limbs stuck out oddly. The skin had mottled to a watercolor wash of blues and browns, yellows and purples. The tongue protruded.
In the refrigerator case, kept cool by a gas generator, the city’s archbishop lay on a steel shelf. In the chilled air, his dignity had been preserved, for the time being. His pale blue oxford shirt was blood-stained, his face expressionless. On the shelves above and below lay the bodies of women, one of whom was his sister.
The staff member’s body would be removed and buried quickly.
But the archbishop’s remains would make one last appearance. One week later, partially restored by a mortician, the body would be placed in an elegant coffin, lid open, so that survivors who believed in heaven could bid farewell to the man who was already long gone.
Melissa Dribben is a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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