Live and let live, please

My dead body count is five. Let me clarify: five people I loved who died and I didn’t mind seeing their bodies.

It made me realise what I see is just an object; an inanimate plank even a loving hand can’t bring to life ever again; the person I loved is just not there.

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For two I sat watching that last gasp and felt guiltily relieved. And that’s what I’m used to as a journalist for half a century now: guilt.

Guilt because I never spoke up for the bloodied body parts, the bodies under foil covers, the little girl with staring eyes and the safety pin her mom pushed through her windpipe.

These are the pictures I used to see almost daily cross my desk.

Some were used – a big mistake, I learnt: people don’t want to stare death in the face – most were just filed away in a metal library cupboard, hidden away from prying eyes forever.

So my dead body count is much higher, if you must know. But my guilt is no less.

A picture of dead hijackers the other day reminded me of that.

Death can be beautiful: our own Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize photo of an emaciated dying child bowing in front of a vulture waiting for the spoils; the rescuer carrying the defenceless body of a dead refugee baby to safety; Jacques Nell’s picture of a man protectively covering a dead child’s body with his red jersey on a beach in KwaZulu-Natal after the deadly floods.

Empathy – that’s what these images invoke in any beating human heart.

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But it’s the stark deaths that get me, like the court video I had to watch of a drug addict’s last moments because the “nurse” on duty simply didn’t know how to save him.

Then the “doctor” walking in, callously signing his death certificate without even bothering getting his body off the floor.

It’s the injustice of that “doctor” getting a fine – a mere slap on the wrist – knowingly causing a young father’s death but plea-bargaining for a lesser sentence. And there’s my guilt again.

Did I tell the world about his then fiancée’s pain, apart from her one quote: “Your justice system is broken”?

So, to all the plumbers and bummers, next time you rubbish columnist Jennie Ridyard for the umpteenth time on the letters page, know she, like me, has seen her fair share of death and is decidedly not flippant about life.

Don’t let your crack show, please.