Another memoriam found in the Borrego Badlands just outside of Borrego Springs. This one was tough, as are many of the descansos I happen upon, because it apparently homages not one, but two decedents, and while markers memorializing multiple folks are bad enough, the ones that truly darken a human’s heart are those that remember lost children.
Which this one seems to do, along with his mother, though I couldn’t know for certain, because there weren’t any epithets or names about this descanso, not that I could determine. There were no legible words on the cross, no proper names written on any of the offerings. There were statues of the Virgin Mary, plastic flowers, solar lanterns, Catholic-style glass candles, and a few Halloween decorations.
Of course, the striking components of this descanso are the central, hollowed rock aside the cross, and its materials therein, which include a presumed photo of the folks who’d passed…a mother and her son. Again, I can’t say for sure if the child in the photo was part of the accident, but generally speaking, when families and friends leave toys at memorials, it tends to imply a child’s premature passing into the next world. Or it’s certainly possible that the boy himself was the sole casualty of the accident, and a grieving mother placed a photo of both of them in his descanso. Again, I can’t know for certain without epithets leading me the way. Not that I think all descansos need titling, because I definitely don’t. These roadside honorariums are for their families primarily, and I’m only a passing stranger soul in the ether.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that losing a child to anything, be it a vehicular accident or disease or a school shooting or any damned thing at all, really, is the worst thing that can happen to humans.
It’s not even a close contest.
I’ve lost children myself.
It condemns a parent to a lifelong burden. You might learn to live with it, if you’re fortunate. But you’ll never get over it. And so many, many parents have been forced to live with it during humanity’s brief time on this planet. It permanently changes a woman, or a man. It alters your perception of reality as well as reality itself. The idea of your child’s light no longer shining in this world…it’s a pervasive, unending madness. Only if you have the strongest of hearts and minds, can you move forward, in time, even if you have other children to tend. It’s biological, our primal response to losing children before we die ourselves. It’s chemical. And yes, it’s spiritual. It’s all of those things.
We are beings hardwired to accept we will pass before our offspring do. That’s the nature of reality. Numbers-wise, that is indeed what the majority experiences. But the minority, which is not really a minority at all, when we’re talking millions and millions of parents having lost their children, that isn’t their norm. They were ‘exceptions,’ and they get to endure all that goes along with losing a child, including their community’s soft-paddling platitudes, and the fear in everyone’s eyes that screams There but for the graces of gods go I.
I hate that look with a white hot passion. I know people are just trying to sympathize, and empathize. But if they haven’t been through it, they just can’t do it proper, and I don’t blame them. How could I? Some things in humanity you can only know if you experience it direct. I don’t say that about a lot of human things. But losing a child is one of them.
While offering my tidings to this young mother and her younger child, I thought of how maybe some husband or wife or spouse at home had to suffer the dual loss of losing their spouse and their child. That thought kept me up at night, that kind of pain some human incurred, that pain some human would struggle their entire lifetimes to withstand, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.
Corporeality sucks sometimes. Sometimes it sucks a lot. Any of the Jewish mothers who witnessed their own children being marched into German gas chambers would tell you that. Palestinian mothers in Gaza in this very moment as I’m typing these words, are having the worst day of their lives.
The good news is, these bodies aren’t all that we are.
The bad news is, until we get our shit together…IF we get our shit together…there have been, and will continue to be, a shit ton of suffering in the interim.
In this case, it’d be a relative matter of this mother and child having to brave high desert roads, same as we all do, within two-ton transports fueled by dinosaur fossils, instead of, say, the safety of an advanced transportation system not prone to human error or the multiple, varied conjunctions of thousands of other drivers as susceptible to mood and inattention as ourselves. There’s probably no one hundred percent safe way to move about the earth. It’s a physical world, yes. But there surely are ways in which we could improve our transit footprints, and whittle down those road death numbers a significant amount. Did you know taking one single flight via 747 burns as much fuel as a year’s worth of driving your car every day? Did you know we could, if we wanted, put our cell phones in a timed lock box every time we took a drive? There are plenty of ways to improve the manners in which we protect our children. Don’t get me started on American gun fetishes. That ain’t what this column is about. But nine times out of ten, a child’s death was preventable, and that’s not even considering how science could’ve easily cured early childhood terminal diseases, if proper resources were applied where they belong in the medical field, rather than our idiotically inflated national defense budget. For the amount of money spent on annual upgrades to our nuclear arsenal, we could cure cancer.
That’s a fact. Not an op-ed.
Anyway. I’m off tangent here.
I don’t know your name, madam, nor your child, but looking at his toys, his action figures and his little toy car, my heart broke, as it rightfully should have, and I thought of him, in that next world, playing with new toys, and I hope you both are enjoying your continued life in the Light.
This is powerful writing.