Saying farewell to a boy
Sunday afternoon. My wife and I are sitting in a room of a mud hut filled with people. All of our eyes are focussed on a small, open coffin. Above a white blanket a child’s lovely face is visible. He suffered from a rare type of cancer. Now his parents and his sister have to say farewell.
Sadness and tears. “Why?” sobs the mother, “Why?“ None of us present has an answer.
Suddenly my wife’s mobile rings: “A child has been hit by a car; we need help in the A+E!” She leaves immediately. “And why did this happen?”
I think back to a patient, who came to the hospital four days ago with unspecified pain. My wife agreed to an x-ray. The diagnosis was a shock for all of us: a huge abdominal tumour which had already spread to the liver. “Why?”
In his book “Faithbook – a journalist is looking for heaven“ Markus Spieker, a ARD-correspondent (ARD is the German equivalent of BBC1) writes about his search for hope. 2 in 3 Germans have lost their belief in heaven, thinking that when they die they will enter a nothingness, a darkness, oblivion.
Why do these people not spend day and night testing the following words of Christ: “He who believes in me, will live even when he dies!” If I was dying of thirst in the desert, I would try my utmost to find an oasis. I want to live; I do not want to die.
It’s peculiar that so many people just shrug their shoulders and attempt to banish their thoughts of death.
Without the perspective of heaven my wife and I would never have founded the Hospital Diospi Suyana. Daily illness and death, despair and bitterness and the fact that every therapy is short, frustrating and always ends in death./KDJ
