December, 2011

We tie her feet together, lacing the strip of gauze in a figure eight around her big toes. Kadiza stuffs a pinch full of cotton into her ears then nose. The airway is removed from her mouth and placed in a bucket next to a glass cylinder of darkish brown fluid attached to a small foot pump. We tried to save her from drowning, desperately, our efforts futile. Now she is a corpse. We roll her gently from side to side, mopping up pools of blood and sweat from under her body. The family brings two wrappers, pieces of brightly colored material, wildly opposed but combined for one sole purpose. We place one underneath, rolling her to the right, then left, feeding the material under the weight of her body, like we’d all learned in nursing school. In a fleeting moment I think, ‘help us out a little here, you’re heavy. I’m tired too.’ But she really is dead. I remember that and feel badly. I am mad though, at the family for arriving too late; at us, for being ill equipped to provide the emergency obstetrics we say we do. Pulmonary edema, not what you’d expect to die from in pregnancy. Yet, these women are so sick to begin with.