It has become a ritual; the slow march of corpse- bearing Korean officials, stretcher in hand, sombre looks, and a covered body. This is the trend across international Television channels as more bodies are recovered at the shoreline where families go through the harrowing process of identifying their loved ones, mostly children. I watched as a mother collapsed into a heap, uncontrollable, and a father stared into space as the neat formation of Korean security officials march past, a white sheet over the body of a harmless child who was swallowed by the deep.
My heart sinks to my knees as I imagine those moments of fear, struggle and then quiet. The moments of solitude, the encounter with choking, drowning, and then I heard that a ship had sunk off the coast of South Korea. I was gobsmacked. My stomach churned and turned as I thought of the panic, the run for safety, the slow sleeping of water unto the ship and the final death knell, when the torrent knocked off the passengers and locked them in the ship, sweeping them struggling from end to end.
I have been on cruises severally. It’s one of my leading relaxation modes.
I have always felt at peace at sea. It is therapeutic and calm when the world has dealt me a blow, being ever so busy, stressed out and needing to run away, the sea is where I resort to. I am either out at sea or I head for nature, a mountain, a resort, a large garden of lawns and more lawns and greens, the air crisp and unspoilt, the sea wavy, beautiful, and mesmerizing.
As the body count begins from the sunken ship, I know as I have always known that the sea, innocent as it looks, therapeutic as it is, also carries death in its pouch, throwing up the mysteries of the deep. I don’t swim yet I know that there were swimmers on that ship and it would not have mattered to the tidal waves and strong currents that are beyond man, if you swam. Angry waters show no mercy, carnivorous sea animals have no friends and again I ponder the mysteries of the deep.
As a mother, my grief is different; it’s mindboggling, hair-raising and harrowing… I think of children who were out on an excursion that has a history. It is sad that it had to be their set that got caught up in a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. The mayday message of an eight year old boy calling for rescue is heart-breaking and scary, all at once. Bright young things, snuffed out in the mid-morning light, darkness in the yellow blaze of a starting day. The tragedy heightens as they bring up the bodies re-uniting them with their inconsolable parents. It reaches a crescendo when one sees the unspeakable grief in the vacant and contorted faces of those parents whose children are still in the recesses of a fierce body of water 198 in number. A number as fearful as it is scandalous.
The logistic of the South Korean rescue operation and the sheer scale puts us all to shame, especially when you check rescue operations in most African countries. In this South Korean operation, there are 700 divers risking their lives for their nation, for school children already presumed dead. But they go into the unforgiving sea anyway, sometimes forty times in a day, in the dark, to the unknown, into the crevices and secrets of a man-eating ship.
It has been long nights for me and difficult days, just watching the ritual for the dead, the bone-chilling screams, the empty hugs of families, and the covered bodies. I have watched the shame of a captain whose eternal burden is the memory of dead children, his life a mess of regrets, of what could have been, what could have been done, his bitter wishes for the cold hands of death. For perhaps it would have been better if the world had no one to hold accountable for the death of so many children, if it had been said that in trying to rescue his passengers, the captain paid the supreme price, but now our fingers all point at a man whose peace has long departed him. He will go down in history as the man who abandoned ship and left children and teenagers to battle with the mysteries of the deep. A corpse always unnerves whether it’s for you or for another but if corpse after corpse is pulled out of water and the headcount for the dead is already 104 with 198 still missing, almost a week after the ship sank. It is fearful. The world mourns…. Humanity needs rescue… mysteries pile. Let us pray.
Eugenia Abu
