I gather them up from the battlefield. Men who come to me wide-eyed with terror and pain. I remember, one of them, he pushed me back. His missus was gonna have a baby soon, and he was damned if they’d grow up with no dad! He was damned if he’d never even see his own kid! I reached for him again, as his strength drained away. His eyes changed from fierce, to helpless, and he came with me. I guess he was damned.
I help them up out of nursing homes and hospital beds. One old lady, she laughed to be free of her bed-ridden body. She took my hands and spun me round in a dance she danced at her wedding, some seventy years before. She smiled. You took your time coming for me, I’ve been waiting these last two years at least! She looked around expectantly. Where’s my Ralph? He promised he’d be waiting. She saw a door. Most people need my help, but she dropped my hands and ran, laughing, into the world beyond.
I haul them out of pools of their own blood, as the knife or gun falls from their hand. One of them was floating in an overflowed bathtub, vivid red blood swirling patterns through the water. The kitchen knife he wielded sunk to the bottom of the tub as I pulled him from the water. He looked at me with tired, hollow eyes, and shook his head. Please, no. He murmured. Please, I thought that was it, I thought there was nothing else. I just want it to be over. I put a hand, gently, on his shoulder, and steered him to the door. I’m sorry. I said quietly. It’s not that easy.
I pull them away from their beds, as infants begin to wail. One of them, she screamed louder than the child she’d just given birth to. You can’t take me! Look at my baby! My baby is hungry! Her voice softened and blurred with ghostly tears, she was only sixteen and she would never be older. I’m not ready to go. If I go now what will happen to my baby? She looked at me, her eyes filled with sorrow. Please. I didn’t even give him a name. I whispered that she will see her baby again, at a time when names don’t matter. She nods, hopelessly, and follows me. And I wonder if what I told her was true.
I hold the children in my arms. So very many children. They come to me because there was not enough food, or water, or space, or air, or love, for them to keep living. I pick them up off the ground, out of cots, from their mother’s arms. I pull them out of the ocean, and rivers, and swimming pools. I find them trampled under the feet of uncaring, manic crowds, and left alone, out on the ice, because there’s not enough food. I disentangle them from where they smothered themselves under the bedclothes, and I hold close to me the ones whose hearts just stopped beating, for no reason at all. Sometimes I have to take into my trembling hands, the littlest ones, the ones I pull out of the womb; their tiny, bright lives aborted because there is not enough love in the world for them.
The children say nothing. I gather them up and they do not struggle. They want to be held, and I hold them, so carefully, as I carry them on to the next world. And I pray, and pray, that there is a God who loves them where they’re going. That they will never be hungry, or thirsty, or hurt, or alone. And that someone will hold them. Because all any of them want is love.
