The condolences flow in a tide.
Her husband, Praveen, says,
“People don’t really know how to express
their sympathy. They don’t mean harm,
but they don’t know how to be sensitive.
But I know they mean well.”
He tells the newborn story of the death of his wife,
the preventable death, her sacrifice to a belief.
How this must grieve him, how this must gall him
to recount a story that can be interrupted
in the telling by a pause, a breath, a kiss,
when the events themselves now cannot be.
But he is Hindu—or at least she was—
and the way of blame offers no solace.
She is dead now, there is letting go to do;
how many things can a man carry at once?
He tells the reporters the story because there is
a lesson to be shared, and he is generous with release:
The trouble with her pregnancy, her sense of something amiss;
the hospital staff’s reassurances, the waters breaking,
her request for an end to the pregnancy, their denial,
infection setting in, the waning of her health,
the continued reassurances; the measures taken too late.
Her death. She was gone before he could take her hand.
When she was admitted, her visiting parents had returned to India;
everything would be fine, they were told.
Now Praveen says, “These past four and a half years,
they have been a gift, a gift from God, a gift so good
I would never have believed it possible.”
Her mother says, “Tell the people in Ireland to be sure
no more daughters are lost this way.”
Her brief life now mother to a cause, Savita presses onward.
