Nong Naam

“I don’t want to hurt your heart”, I said to her in Thai, as she took her customary stance of arms overhead, back facing me, ready to be thrown as high as my strength would allow. Surprisingly, she did not protest. Instead, she turned back around. Hands still in the air, giving a squinty eyed, toothy smile, she said “tong” (stomach). I knew without thinking what Nong Naam wanted. It had been my heart-friendly alternative to throwing her in the air since she returned home from the hospital a week prior with the news that she had holes in her septum. This rare heart disease, which is quite common in individuals with Downs Syndrome like Naam, allowed blood to flow where it shouldn’t, creating more stress on the heart and consequently decreasing oxygen flow through the body. But this means nothing to a five-year old. Instead, we needed to be more careful for her.

So I took my newly adjusted position, feet firmly planted beneath me. Securing my hands between her shoulders and armpits and using the power of my legs, I slowly lifted Naam up off of the coarse pavement. Her tiny green flip-flops began to dangle off of her toes as I progressively said the word “gin” (to eat) while simultaneously bringing her body higher in the air and closer to my skyward face. When her stomach met my mouth, I instantaneously shouted “tong”. She began to laugh uncontrollably as I shook my head into her black and white flowered dress, pretending to eat her stomach.

“Eek tee!”, she shouted, joy radiating from her perfectly placed porcelain features.

“I can’t do it another time right now Naam, I need to head back to work”, I replied apologetically.

She did not like this response and placed her little hand, with its small extra thumb, into my own palm. She began to walk with me in the direction of my bike until her mother reiterated the fact that I needed to return to work at the Care Center. As I put my flip flops back on, using the pillar to my left as a support, I told Naam that I would see her in three hours when she returned back to the Garden from Hands of Hope and that we would play then.

But we didn’t play when she got home. We couldn’t. Nong Naam never came back home yesterday.

Two hours after I left Hands of Hope, Nong Naam began to throw up immense amounts of bloods, shortly seizing before falling limp from lack of oxygen. Help arrived quickly but she was not breathing and her heart had already stopped. Crisidad, one of the nurses from the Care Center, performed CPR on Naam while Phermsack rushed them to the hospital. The emergency room staff continued to try and resuscitate her, pumping out masses of blood that had invaded her internal organs. But it was already too late. Naam had lost too much blood, a life-threatening symptom of the anticoagulant drug she had been taking to try and regulate and inhibit the mixing of oxygen- rich and oxygen poor blood being sent to the heart. The ER staff continued to pump her bare, purple chest until the car carrying myself, but most importantly, her mother, Viscunie, arrived shortly after.

So it is with tear stained cheeks I must say that today, I, as well as all of the Garden and Hands of Hope community, am the one with the hurt heart and stomach being eaten by grief and anger and confusion.

The word in Thai for sorry/ sad is sia jai, which literally translates to damaged or broken heart. I couldn’t think of a more apt term for what I am feeling. My heart feels broken.

However, even more so, I keep finding myself not feeling at all. It is like I am completely detached from my emotions. I keep noticing myself reiterating in my head, “Nong Naam died yesterday”. I can’t get out of my head the images of her blood soaked face laying lifeless in the emergency room, or dressing her in a pink tulle dress after she was cleaned, or kissing her on her cold forehead one more time before leaving the hospital. But yet still, there are parts of my mind that are in complete denial. Parts that keep trying to deceive me into believing that this is all an illusion, that it was not her coffin that we all slept next to last night, that it was not the tears of her mother I heard as she laid next to me, staring at a photo of Naam all night, not her body we buried today. Parts of my mind that want me to believe that tomorrow as I get to work Nong Naam will be sitting at the picnic table at the Care Center in her starched white collared uniform shirt, navy blue skirt, and light blue overlay, with her hair in three pig tails on her head, waiting to be driven to school. But then the other parts of my mind remind me of the unthinkable truth. That doesn’t mean my body hasn’t figured out some other defense mechanisms to bar out reality.

I didn’t cry at the funeral today. My body wouldn’t let me. It might be because I used up my whole reserve of tears yesterday. Or it could be because I did not really sleep much last night. Or it could be that my mind is protecting itself by just not feeling at all. Now, I hate crying. I use all the strength I have to not cry when I think I am going to. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn’t. But today, I prayed that God would just let me feel. That He would just let me feel the full weight of all that was going on around me. I wanted to connect my emotions with the deep dark dungeon of images floating in my mind. I wanted to break down all the defenses I have built against my emotions. For the first time ever, I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t. I got teary eyed watching Viscunie beginning to faint, for the fourth time, watching people cleanse Naam’s body in her coffin with a water soaked palm leaf. I had a deep-seated rage in my bones watching Naam’s dad, who become a Buddhist monk a few weeks ago, sit next to the coffin, knowing that he physically abused Viscunie and sexually abused pure, innocent Nong Naam. I felt comfort as one of the patients held my hand during the ceremony. I felt a sickness in my stomach as two-year old Nong Gaa asked, “Where is Nong Naam? I don’t see her.” I felt confusion and anger at Naam being taken out of the world so soon. I felt tranquility thinking of my uncle Patrick, who also had Downs Syndrome and passed away thirteen years ago, but who still lives in my heart and winks down at me from heaven every time I see a butterfly, his favorite animal. I felt peace knowing that Naam loved and was loved by so many people. I felt melancholy knowing I will never see Nong Naam again. But yet, I still could not cry.

Maybe that’s because the other part of my heart, the part that is not in denial, is trying to tell me I don’t need to shed tears because Nong Naam will forever be in my heart, just as is my uncle Patrick and my grandparents, Granna and Pa, and the four other patients that have died since my time in Nong Khai.

I may have only had her in my life for three months, but she was the type of child that you love instantly, the kind of child who reaches to the core of your soul. I loved Nong Naam deeply and it seems that everywhere there are reminders of her in the Garden – my flip flops that she would always steal and I would have to retrieve at her house, the crayon on the wall in her house, her clothes still on the laundry line, her mother. I need to keep reminding myself to use these reminders of the good times I had with Naam - of holding her at the waterfall, of playing with her every single day after work, of her doing my hair with Nonnie, of her finally calling me “Bridgid” and not just “B”, of her having me carry her back to her house many nights because she didn’t to let go of me yet, of her knocking on my bedroom door because she wanted to play, of her unexpectedly entering our home, of spinning her around like an airplane, of throwing her in the air, and her laugh as I pretended to eat her stomach. That’s the Naam I fell in love with. That’s the Naam I want to remember.