Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper

Author:Anderson Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061136689
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Published: 2007-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

“AMINU’S DEAD.”

Charlie Moore, my producer, tells me when he gets back from the intensive care ward. Aminu was four. Yesterday he seemed better. Yesterday was a long time ago.

“Aminu’s dead.”

That’s all the nurses said. They don’t know exactly what killed him. They don’t do autopsies here in Maradi. No point. No time. Aminu was starving, but that’s not what finally did him in. He’d been sick for months, hospitalized for the last two weeks. His body was riddled with infections. He might have had malaria; his skin was peeling off.

“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.

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