• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Aminu’s dead.”

When Charlie tells me, I’m surprised at how shocked I am. We both knew this could happen; it’s just not what I expected. It seems so unfair. Dr. Tectonidis had been optimistic. Aminu had been eating sweets, drinking his milk formula. He’d made it through the worst of his illness. He was going to be our success story, a bundle of hope to end our report after the death of Habu. We both know what this means. We find our cameraman and head back to the hospital. That’s what we’re here for, after all, to document the death. That’s how it works, isn’t it? Tell stories, get pictures, look out for just such poignant moments. It’s not pretty how poignancy is made.

At the hospital, Aminu’s bed is empty. His mother, Zuera, left this morning.

“When there’s bed pressure, they throw them out faster,” Dr. Tectonidis explains. “When there’s no bed pressure, they tend to keep them a bit.”

Aminu was buried a few hours after he died. Women are not allowed in the cemetery, so Zuera didn’t see her son’s body wrapped in white cloth and deposited in the sandy soil like an oversize seed hastily planted in the earth. There was no service, no headstone. Nothing marks the grave. A little mound is all that remains. We go and videotape it, but it barely reads on camera.

When a child dies at night in the intensive care ward, the nurses let his mother sleep by his side. I can’t get this image out of my mind. Did Zuera speak to her baby in the pitch black of night? When she opened her eyes in the morning, did she think he was still alive? How many seconds was it before she remembered?

Aminu’s dead.

IT TAKES US half a day to find out where Zuera lives, another half day to get there.

It’s a small village in the midst of a cornfield. A collection of thatched huts and mud homes. When we arrive, Zuera is sitting outside her one-room house, in a courtyard surrounded by women, their feet splayed out in front of them.

Her elderly husband is there as well, standing in a group of men, off to the side. No one seems particularly surprised that Aminu has died. There is no crying, no wailing. Death has come to this village before. Aminu is the first child Zuera has lost, but nearly every mother here has lost at least one child.

“He was a good boy, a gentle boy,” Zuera says softly. “They tried their best for him.” She holds her youngest child, Sani, in her arms. He is two and doesn’t understand what’s happened to his brother. “He was always with Aminu,” Zuera says. “This morning he kept calling out his name.”

Behind her, two women stand over waist-high wooden mortars, pounding millet into flour. The dull thud of the pestles, one after the other, the steady pulse of village life. I pick up a wooden pestle, shiny smooth at either end from years of sweat and scraping. It’s heavy and hard to imagine anyone wielding it day after day. The women laugh when I pretend to be too weak to hold it.

Nearby, Zuera’s grandmother sits with three other elderly women, picking at a bowl of dried leaves—the staple of their diet for months.

Aminu is the thirteenth great-grandchild of hers to die. Half of her thirty-eight grandchildren have died as well. She can’t even remember all their names.

Inside Zuera’s one-room house is a twin bed with a thin mattress—little else. I’ve been in dozens of homes like this over the years, and every time, I still find it shocking. A dirt floor, makeshift shelves. The only decoration: some torn pages from an old magazine taped to one of the walls. Zuera has more than most—the benefit of having an older husband, perhaps—but I can’t imagine what her life is really like. The few pieces of clothes Aminu wore will be given to his little brother. There are no pictures of any of the children. Photos are expensive, and Aminu was too young. Zuera will have nothing to remember her dead son by. None of the mothers ever do. The pictures we’ve taken of Aminu and Habu and the others are likely the only images that will ever exist of them. The only markers that they were