'til it's gone

I was packing for a trip to Parakou for the weekend when Modeste walked over to my house. He said a sentence to me in English of which the only part I understood was the verb “to die” at the end. After repeating it to me in French, I got the message: my neighbor’s 2-year-old daughter had passed away the night before.

I’m not particularly close with this neighbor. I’m closer with her kids. And despite their ability to show up at the exact moments when I most want to be alone or their ability to go from happily coloring to screaming in one moment, only three days after the family left for the village of the kids’ father, I miss someone yelling “Auntie” at me as soon as I walk into our compound.

The only thing Modeste could tell me about the cause of death was “disease.” It’s too far into the hot season for it to be malaria. It’s not uncommon for infants to die from dehydration. There’s been an outbreak of cholera in the south.

But what was the cause isn’t what really matters. What matters is that the child that I saw the evening before lying with her mother underneath the citrus tree outside my house is no longer alive, and all that I’m left with each time I walk past the locked doors and windows of their house is the question of whether they are ever going to come back.