Karolina McCreight

 

A child is born. A new life is there. Numerous bundled cells that now come up as a unity. A unity that is a human being., whose life on earth just has started. But, did maybe another one end for it? It is obvious that some another life on earth came to it’s end, but was it maybe the life of the person that gave a new life? What about the mother? Why do we not see her, taking the baby into her arms? Why is it just the doctors that take it out of her womb, and why do we see only the midwife washing the child?  The baby being washed resembles a symbol of purity, yet is it this pure? Is it not just the appearance? The assumption that this just born fragile human being has an undefiled soul must not be the right one.

It is obvious that the mother was suffering before and while giving birth, but what if she did not survive it? Is this child, being washed for the first time, so pure then? One cannot blame the child for being born, yet it appears slightly macabre to see it as unblemished and pure, if considering the fact that the origin of it’s existence ended someone  else’s life. Moreover, it is also astonishing, how fast pain and grief can be forgotten, due to joy about something. In this case, how grief and pain about death can quickly be overwhelmed by the joy about a new life, how grief can be superseded by joy. It is fascinating, how close pain and joy can be.

One has to admit that it is a bit awkward, how mortality has to be a part of continuity. And how this infinite continuity (of life on earth) is provided by finite lives of individuals (or in same cases of crowds). Yet,  it is like an ever turning  wheel, like  a mill driven by death and birth. Where people go, another people come. Where a certain sort fades away, a new one comes into being. Joy surrounds it’s environment when a child is being born, which turns into grief when the same person dies. The brightness, purity and richness one day become replaced by darkness, melancholy and emptiness.

As pure as the newborn appear, we are all contaminated by the gene of extermination.