Afterlife

Spring. Bulbs and buds burst into flower. Things come back to life.

Ayya's namesake Anne was born in Spring, in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 25^th (also known as Lady Day, or the Annunciation), the day when people in Medieval Europe thought the world began.

Anne with her mother, Jessie (Kay) Stevenson (nee Keller)

What threads connect Anne to Ayya? What affinities, beyond a name, and a fraction of shared genetic material?

As a young woman, Anne lived in Africa for five years. She had just married a Frenchman, Jean-Paul, and accompanied him to Cameroon, where he was to work as a teacher in lieu of military service. She was a new mother at the time (she carried my cousin Miriam with her), and it was there that she gave birth to her second child, Eric.

One of my favourite works of anthropology is a study of infancy in West Africa. Among the Beng of Cote d’Ivoire, children are understood to come from the Afterlife. In their way of thinking, people’s spirits enter a sort of limbo when they die. When babies are born, they gain passage back into life. Babies are welcomed home, cared for and venerated partly because they are recognized as the reincarnations of dead ancestors. [1]

Ayya on blanket from Cameroon, given to my parents by Anne & Jean-Paul

There’s truth in the Beng way of thinking, because in a real sense children are the reincarnations of ancestors. Scrolling through Anne’s Facebook-feed for photos to illustrate this blog post, I sometimes had the strange feeling of not knowing whether it was Miriam or her mom I was looking at. Sometimes I get myself and my cousin Eric confused.

 

OK not in this photo. Definitely Anne with a dog.

“Ticky-tacky, wicky-wacky stuff”

Anne died six years ago, shortly before Asa was born. My step-dad Clive died last year, shortly before Ayya was born.

Neither of them were religious in a conventional sense: Anne subscribed to no particular system of belief; Clive was an atheist. But I believe both of them were comforted by the knowledge that family and friends survived them.

Not long before she died, Anne mused on what death meant for her. "Well, you know," she said, "where I'm going, I don't think it's going to be very far.... Not that I believe in all that ticky-tacky-wicky-wacky stuff.... But I just don't think I'm going to be very far."

 Photograph by Nikki Rudzik

There's comfort in the thought that, even after death, loved ones are still with us. And sometimes there's truth in it.

Reference

[1] Alma Gottlieb.The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. Chicago University Press (2004). There are some video clips here that accompany the book.

Cataract / VI

At about 4 o’clock this afternoon, Asa came around after being under anaesthetic for a cataract operation. It was the first time he’d had surgery – indeed, anything but routine eye exams – for more than a year.

Selam and I felt more anxious than we’d expected to be about this operation. It brought back memories of difficult times. Times – there had been dozens of them – when we waited, with a mixture of fear and hope, for news of how the procedure had gone. There had been a few times when we’d felt we we were close to losing him – like that time when he was on second-line chemo, and I was in Congo, and Selam told me over the phone that his Hickman line was infected. Or that time, during the third course of chemotherapy, when he went into anaphylactic shock.

Compared to those occasions, this cataract operation was low-risk. And, thank goodness, it went smoothly.

As Asa gradually regained consciousness, he put his fingers to the plastic shield taped over his right eye to protect it. Selam sat at the foot of the bed, with one hand on Asa’s leg; every now and then she reached over to the pram in which baby Ayya lay, and rocked her.

“I want to take it off,” Asa said.

“Not yet,” Selam said. “Tomorrow morning, when the doctor’s checked your eye.”  

Visual Impairment

Within the last few weeks Asa has for the first time started to talk confidently about how he sees, and to acknowledge that he is visually impaired. For years we tiptoed around the topic. We wanted him to enjoy childhood like any other boy. His certification (Severely Visually Impaired) ensured he got extra help in nursery and primary school, but we didn’t want him to feel labelled. To feel deficient.

Now that he’s had a few years of special treatment – Braille lessons, homework assignments printed in larger font than the other children get, and experience with a variety of visual aids like magnifying glasses – he recognizes that he’s different.

What impresses us most of all is that he doesn’t complain. He speaks of it matter-of-factly.

 

When Asa gets up from the hospital bed, he asks us to tie a blindfold partway round his head to keep light from the sensitive eye. We walk back to the hotel where we’ll spend the night before the post-op check in the morning.

The promise of the cataract operation is that Asa will see better out of his right eye. Not necessarily better than he did before the cataract developed, but better than he has for the last few months. More importantly, it improves the view the doctors get of the back of his eye when they examine him, so they can keep tabs on the tumours on his retina.

In the hotel room, Asa spreads out his Lego on the carpet. And, in that special way of children at play, he seems to forget about everything else in the world.