The Ginger Child by Patrick Flanery

Author:Patrick Flanery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

LOSS

A year after being approved as potential adopters, we have an annual review with Gemma’s new supervisor, Adriana, an Italian woman who is the most sympathetic social worker we have encountered since Eleanor. It is not lost on any of us that Adriana, too, is an outsider in Britain. She is well educated, thoughtful, attentive to our concerns. She seems to recognize that we have not felt understood or even seen by the whole of the British social care system.

For the first time in months, we feel hope again, but it is a hope immediately undercut by grief.

When you are a late-in-life child, you arrive at the season of loss sooner than most. A few years earlier, Andrew’s father suffered several small strokes, but remained stable until now, when he has a bad fall, contracts pneumonia, comes out of the hospital with what appears to be dementia, and spends weeks in a care unit. He eventually goes home and my mother-in-law looks after him with the help of assistants and nurses.

By January he seems to be recovering, but has slowed down appreciably. Most of his days are spent at home in his plantation chair on the veranda, looking over the tops of eucalyptus trees to the mountains which must be for him, now nearly blind, little more than a shifting blur of greens and ochres that disappear into a white mist when the clouds descend.

Then, just before Valentine’s Day, he develops an infection and returns to the hospital for treatment. He seems once again to be recovering until, one morning, he suddenly passes away.

By chance, Andrew is already in the country. I fly out. My sister-in-law and her youngest daughter fly out. Relatives from across South Africa drive or fly to be there for the memorial service.

Andrew takes in hand most of the arrangements for the service and tying up the estate, co-ordinating with lawyers. He manages everything with a dizzying efficiency and calm, but in the midst of that calm, on summer mornings in the Western Cape, the floral arrangements wilting after only a few days no matter how much care we lavish on them, I look at him and worry, because in my American way I expect to see grief manifested in tears and sobbing or rage and depression, and I see none of those things.

In April, just after Easter, Gemma contacts us for the first time in months, sending a profile of a boy, O—, who is about to turn four. She wonders if we might be interested. Yes, I respond after quickly reading through his profile, we are.

I will look back on this moment and think that our emotional vulnerability made us desperate for this particular child to work when we had always insisted we wanted a child much younger, under the age of two, as close to newly arrived in the world as possible. What else but our own vulnerability and need for the promise of another life, the promise that our own lives would

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