Overfamiliarity with death [Bryan]

One of the great pleasures in my life is Harper's Magazine, especially their "Readings" section. This section compiles the most interesting readings from across the world -- speeches, poems, 911 emergency transcripts, speeches, interviews, court decisions, and so forth. There are always two or three items in that section that touch me deeply. This month, there was a selection from Anthony Loyd's memoir, Another Bloody Love Letter. Loyd was a reporter covering the bloody conflict in Sierra Leone. While he is there, he is involved in a serious automobile accident. He and his young friend and translator, Allieu, are critically injured. Loyd desperately tries to revive and get emergency aid for his friend, but instead onlookers end up looting his demolished car. Everyone in the war-torn landscape seems reluctant to help. He eventually is dropped off at a camp where Nigerian soldiers stand passively watching Loyd desperately perform CPR on his friend. He continues:

There were five of them, and they moved not an inch but stood motionless in a row looking down upon me, their eyes blank, faces devoid of any expression. What I saw in those placid brown pools was a listless overfamiliarity with death, and it enraged me. F--- you all, I thought, spitting more of Allieu's blood from my mouth in preparation for the next breath into him; f--- your awful continent where children's deaths are so commonplace as to be boring; f--- your mutilations and your mumbo jumbo and your jungle and your disease and your poverty and your heat and your hunger. F--- your endless reasons to die. Would that I could defy them all and save at least this one man's life.

Then one of them bent down wordlessly and stayed my arm. It was a profound gesture, full of grace and compassion. I stopped what I was doing and accepted its message, the madness leaving me. I closed Allieu's eyes and folded his hands across his chest, as one of the soldiers sighed. "Yes," one murmured. I looked up. "l'm sorry," each quietly said in tum. I stood up. They put their hands on my shoulders and shook me, gently and persistently, with a soft incantation of a low, repeated, "Hey, hey, hey, hey," a sound loaded with the deep understanding of sorrow, the echoed communication of the universal nature of death and loss. I leaned down and held one of Allieu's hands for a while, resting my other palm first on his chest, then on his forehead. His skin was just beginning to cool. He looked like a little boy again: a thin, brown wisp in his raggedy shorts and T-shirt. A dead African boy who had survived much and had just had what little he possessed taken from him by coming down the road with me for sixty dollars a day. "Goodbye, Allieu," I said, and walked away.

In its affirmation of a common humanity, there is something in this moment that deserves the title "revelation."