3am
It's 3am. I wake from my sleep to the sound of a terrible wailing. Eerie and seemingly unending, at first I cannot understand what I am hearing. Then I realise... it means Mohammed has died. Mohammed was a young boy who had been bed bound since before I knew him. Very sick from a very young age. One evening I took him and his mother to another Doctor. The Doctor examined him and told me in English, so the mother wouldn't understand, that this young boy was riddled with cancer, that the huge swelling was not infection, but out of control cancer cells, that he was going to die. He refused to tell the mother this bad news, believing it too much for her to handle. In such situations to tell someone such terrible news directly was seen as 'wrong'. The news needed to be shared in a gentle, indirect way, What should I say, and to who? What should I do? Now, two weeks later.... the terrible sound, of ‘mourning and great weeping’, the sound of a mother ‘refus