POV Kevin
This sentence has always resonated with me:
"Life is wise to deceive us, for if it told us what it holds in store, we would refuse to be born."
I think my childhood is the perfect expression of all this, calling my own existence into question, sometimes wishing I had never been born. Sick, mocked, abused, humiliated, pitied, unloved, betrayed, disappointed, lost—and yet still walking the ground of this earth. And you don't have to go back very far to see where my ordeal began.
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Kevin, age 10
Back home for a few days between two hospital stays, alone in the apartment with his sister, Kevin was coughing without the slightest letup. A large amount of blood was coming out of his mouth; the floor and the toilet bowl he was vomiting into were already full of blood.
"Ahhh…" he panted during a brief moment of respite.
"Take your time, big brother," said Marie, trying to help her brother.
A sharp pain ran through him, making him writhe on the floor in his own blood.
"Ah, ah ahhhhhh," Kevin began to scream, clutching his chest, his mouth full of blood.
The pain was unbearable, untenable, as if his heart were being torn out. His screams grew louder under the paralyzed gaze of his sister, who could only shed tears.
POV Marie
"Big brother! I'm calling an ambulance, hang in there!"
A few minutes later, the sound of a siren rang out and my brother was taken away, after an entire hour of vomiting blood and writhing in pain. Of course, there was no way I was going to leave my brother alone, and I rode with the paramedics. After we arrived at the hospital, I watched over him all night, the doctors having finally managed to stabilize him.
Now I was sitting there, watching him lying in his hospital bed once again. As far back as I can remember, and from what I've been told, his illness appeared around the age of one, and it only got worse over time. His health gradually deteriorated between the ages of one and five: he had violent bouts of fever with vomiting that nearly killed him several times.
We tried to have him treated by an awakened healer, but even he wasn't able to cure him.
"I have never seen an illness like this. Medication, treatments, mana healing—nothing has worked for your son," the doctor told my mother, who burst into tears.
"What are we supposed to do, doctor…?" my mother asked.
"The only thing you can do is prepare yourselves for the worst. I'm sorry," said the doctor, leaving the room.
These memories marked my childhood: my five-year-old brother lying in a hospital bed, his eyes aching despite the painkillers. My mother would take my brother's hand and press it to her tear-stained face, while our father wasn't there to support us.
"My little Kevin," she said, trembling, seeing her child so seriously ill.
My mother, who was very religious, began to pray; it was the only refuge and the only glimmer of hope she had left. Every day, every hour, she devoted her time to praying, hoping that a miracle would save her beloved son.
"My God, I am sick, I am weakened, my languor invades my heart and my body… I am like all the sick: I hide and I think far too much about myself; I torment myself and mask my worry… I pretend to live… Our God, my God, deliver me from my illness. Let me no longer be ashamed of it, nor afraid… Heal me of my distress through your tenderness, so that I may live with your strength in my weakness. Amen."
That was one of the prayers she recited beside my brother, and, as if her faith and her prayers had been heard, my brother began to recover. At that moment, you could call it a miracle.
There followed an entire year in which my brother recovered. It was his sixth year, a true miracle for the doctors as much as for us. With my brother's ordeal seeming to come to an end, he was finally able to go to school for the first time. I was able to stay with him and spend my first moments with him. He was kind, loving, sociable. I remember the games, the drawings, the stories our mother told us in bed before we fell asleep. The warmth of his body when we slept together, our mother's scolding when we got up to mischief. I also remember our little brother Yan, with whom Kevin spent a lot of time playing and to whom he told stories. We thought it was the end of the tunnel, but reality quickly caught up with us.
After my brother turned 7 and I turned 6, everything fell apart again. I remember it; I was there. On a beautiful afternoon, in the schoolyard, my brother and I were quietly playing soccer with our classmates. He was running straight toward the goal, the ball at his feet, when I saw him suddenly collapse to the ground. Several harsh cracking sounds rang out before a piercing scream of pain froze my blood. My brother was no longer moving, but he was howling in pain like an animal being slaughtered, his body twisted into an impossible position.
His cries of pain alerted the teachers, who came over to us.
"What happened?" one of them asked, as Kevin's screams grew louder and louder.
With tears in my eyes, I just said what I had seen.
"He fell and started screaming."
The teachers tried to move my brother, but that made him scream even louder. It was the firefighters who realized the horrible thing that was happening to him, so horrible that the teachers and firefighters were left petrified.
"My God! All… All of his bones are broken!" said one of the firefighters, horrified.
My brother was rushed to the hospital, the bones in his arms, legs and chest almost entirely shattered. Since the doctors were still unable to cure him, he stayed lying in a hospital bed for two years while his bones healed on their own. The only thing he could do was watch TV in his room or listen to us talk to him. And despite everything that was happening to him, he kept smiling and always stayed cheerful, trying to make us laugh instead of cry.
One day, while my mother was giving him his lessons, his smile disappeared for a moment and he asked my mother something.
"Mom, am I going to live like this my whole life?"
"I don't know."
My brother's eyes grew wet and his voice broke as he went on.
"Mom, did I deserve this?"
"No, certainly not," my mother answered, now unable to hold back her tears, and I couldn't hold back mine either.
While we were going through this ordeal, our father was absent once again. And after the bones, it was my brother's organs that began to burst one by one. The less vital ones, like the spleen, the stomach, the reproductive organs, the colon, the gallbladder, the appendix, and then the vital organs began to burst too. The lungs, the liver, the pancreas, the kidneys… Only continuous care by specialized awakened, combined with machines, was still keeping my brother alive.
"Am I going to die?" That was the question he asked us, but we kept hoping and told him, "No, you're not going to die." It was also the only thing keeping us going. And deep down in his heart, I'm sure he knew we were lying to him.
Then it was his heart's turn to give out, then his brain, and it was in the year he turned 10 that my brother died. In front of his lifeless body lying there, my mother and I each holding one of his hands, our tears couldn't stop flowing. He, whose face had always expressed pain, even on painkillers, now seemed at peace.
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Death is so familiar to us, and yet we know nothing about it. We only know that it is the end of life, and that neither sorrow nor joy follows us there. It is darkness, the end of our earthly ills and torments. It is the beginning of eternal rest or of eternal suffering. And in truth we know nothing, for the truth lies at the bottom of the abyss and no mortal has ever returned from it.