This week my son Lorenzo fell while bouncing around in the park. He was holding a tiny stick, which ended up poking him just above the eyelid. It was a miracle he didn’t scratch his cornea or poke his eye out.
But was it a miracle?
This is how I refer to it in my head every time I see the scabs on his face. I actually feel a chill down my spine and then I can’t help thinking about how vulnerable he is. I feel the fragility heightened by Lorenzo’s early-life wobbliness and by the fact that right now, in his first 1,000 days, my evolutionary purpose as a mother is to make sure he stays alive.
But why can’t I change the narrative in my head?
After all, the eyes represent just a tiny part of the body surface-wise. It is much more likely that Lorenzo would injure his legs or arms or other bits of his face rather than his eyes. Yet, it is hard to see the glass half-full, if you will, to look at the scab neutrally, to stop feeling the fragility of life.
“We’re not designed not to die.” This is how my colleague, Better Politics correspondent Nesrine Malik, put it during a meeting recently. She’s very right.
But death around the beginning of life is something that shakes us more than other deaths. And since reading (and writing) about the death of a five-year-old boy in Brazil, I’ve not been able to unsee other early deaths.
Why do children die?
Every year, some 5.3 million children die before reaching the a…