Because We Hear Their Heartbeat

In thinking of the deep, wordless sorrow a mother hopes never to know, but may come to know too intimately through twist of sedimented reasons, mistakes, and confluences of what ifs…I was reminded of these words from a song, 

“In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears

Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat”

When parents send their children off to school or a field trip we hope they will have a nice and ‘normal’ day. One doesn’t hope for extraordinary anymore…just a normal day would be fantastic. To be sure, though, most parents have a sliver of fear and anxiety lurking at the tiniest corner in his/her heart each time we see our children leave our sight. When they are not in view, we pray for their well-being. While we don’t hold our breath, we do let out a sigh of relief when they return to us or when we have confirmation they are safe and sound

A mourning mother never ‘gets over’ the loss of her child. The laughter and voice of her child will unremittingly haunt the desolate and inconsolable heart of a mother. As one who learns everyday what it means to mother children, I have experienced gut-wrenching sorrow each time a child’s life is extinguished due to our adult desire for power and greed, as well as our stunted imaginations and frighteningly mangled sense of our inability to hold life as valuable. Our children are daily and routinely taken from us through gnawing poverty, too many bullets, stealth drone strikes, abandonment, mean girls and boys, even meaner adults, capitalist death drives, preemptive criminalizations that ransack millions of lives, cavalier neglect, and through the monstrous world-making you and I continue to create while telling them “It’s going to be well. Don’t worry. Trust in us.” All the while many children face the reality of premature death. Many children no longer believe that a future is open to them in ways that we keep insisting. Our young people live in a world that is quickly dying and a future even more doomed than when they were born. Look at all the apocalyptic films and books they are drawn to and then we will know their desperate awareness of a world doomed but also their desperate hope for a future. Their hope is so palpable that I, too, want to believe that a future is still possible.

In the past two weeks we witnessed a Korean ferry full of young people brimming with life sink before our disbelieving eyes. Days later while we’re still trying to wrap our minds around the on-going trauma of lives sinking further into the depths of the ocean we heard the wails of Nigerian mothers for daughters full of life, snatched while learning in school.

In a world driven by the speed of capital flow, sound-bytes and visual splices, we have become incrementally more immune to the shock of suffering, such that even hundreds of deaths and disappearances of bodies fail to sustain our attention and affect for long. For those of us whose children have returned to us, we slowly turn our eyes away. Of course we mourn and we protest with parents whose children have not returned, but we let out a secret sigh of relief that our children have returned to us and we must get on with the ‘business of living.’ We turn away from our sisters and brothers still waiting for the return of their children. We would rather that the shame of ‘getting on with life’ trump our sustained solidarity with those who refuse to ‘move on’ with life but continue to mourn and demand accountability for a loved one wrenched away from them.

Becoming impatient and angrier by each passing day with the slow response of bureaucratic government structures, mothers have rolled up their sleeves and taken to the streets and to the internet, forging solidarity with people in Korea and in Nigeria, demanding answers, expressing their outrage, lamenting loss so great that a piece of them has gone missing too. And so they protest on behalf of their disappeared children. These also remind me of Madres of the Plaza de Mayo –Chilean and Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared who both protested and mourned the disappearance of their children with demands to recover the bodies of the disappeared-as well the Mourning Mothers of Laleh Park. Closer to the U.S., we are reminded of the women of Ciudad Juarez who also protest and mourn the disappearance of their children and continue to demand the recovery of bodies against structures and systems that condone violence against their sons and daughters, and whose officials would rather forget than remember. Mothers everywhere are told there are complex political, social, economic reasons for why things happen, but what is clear and irrefutable in the midst of all these rationalizations is the unfathomable pain and anger at lives lost.

Nigerian mother’s loss, Korean mother’s loss…there is no equivalency and there’s no way that one sorrow can trump another sorrow. The media wants us to grieve one more than the other. In fact, the mass kidnapping in Nigeria received noticeably less media coverage than the Korean ferry sinking during the first week. Perhaps in our pain we give priority to one and not the other, but isn’t it time for all of us to ask why and how these events have shared dimensions? Korean and Nigerian mothers continue to hear the heartbeat of their children. They continue to hear the laughter of their children in the wind. These mothers will never forget their children even as sorrow takes a permanent seat in their heart and outrage claws at them.

This bonding of hearts among different women is well-known, for example, in the stories of Antigone and Ismene. As different as they seem to be, they are more one than is often thought.  I’m remembering Antigone’s unrelenting work of seeking her brother’s body for burial. I’m reminded of her when I see the loss etched into the eyes of these Korean and Nigerian mothers. While these mothers who unrelentingly demand the return of their children are often like the heroic Antigone, we/I are more like her sister Ismene. Peruvian poet Jose Watanabe’s rendition of Antigone reminds us that Antigone and Ismene’s responses are not as distinctly different from each other but more like the two sides of the same coin, “The dead in this story come to me
 not so that I can speak of distant sorrows. They come to me so vividly because they are my own sorrow: I am the sister whose hands were tied by fear.” (Antigona)¹

These children will go on living in the ways that they are remembered. Each of us must take heart and have courage to know that these are not distant sorrows but that they are our own sorrows. These sons and daughters lost to the sea, these sons and daughters forcibly stolen are also our sons and daughters whose laughter in the wind and whose heartbeat we must continue to hear as their mothers hear them.

No matter how much we feel our response may be over due, it is never too late to hear their heartbeat and to continue to mourn, lament, and to be in solidarity with our sisters who have lost their sons and daughters. We mourn with them. We continue to remember with them. We demand justice, for we too hear the heartbeat of our children. Particularly in the U.S., we feel that there’s an action that we must do to feel like we have ‘done something.’ While this is commendable, I wonder if we can also tarry with overwhelming grief and share the on-going work of mourning with our sisters? There are no ‘right actions’ that will lessen the crushing sense of loss many mothers know too well.

However, we cannot not speak up, we cannot not share in the work of mourning. We need to learn ways to tarry with grief rather than hurriedly move on. This solidarity in the on-going work of mourning includes our work of seeking justice and accountability as part of our spiritual and ethical responsibility for the world that is still to come – because we “hear their heartbeat.” Mourning together is not only a spiritual task but also an ethical response that is political and feminist in this fragile life and in this living with one another. #BringOurChildrenHome