Who’s crazy?

I must admit I have sometimes my problems with NuEnglish.

What is a “healing experience”? You can’t heal from grief, I was always told and this has always been my experience, though you can come to term with it to an extent. To “affirm a memory” (what?) is also something defying my grasp of the language, though one understands a vague sense of “affirming the value of every human life” must be what is meant.

There is, therefore, something that separates me and many like me from this use of fashionable expressions which, to my ears, sound so much “new age” expression. Oh, I feeel so healed….

Where there is no difference, is in the understanding of what poor Mr Santorum and his wife must have gone through when a child of them died two hours after birth. I can’t even start to understand what it must mean for the parents to have their child born alive, fear for his life – or fear his impending death – for 120 interminable minutes, and then be told that he has died.

Without using strange words like “affirming one’s memory”, it seems to me the decision of the Santorum was the right one, nay, an excellent one: take the baby home, show the new-born to his little brothers and sisters, and have a funeral there.

I can’t imagine a better way to say to a sadly departed child – certainly looking at them from heaven, as here baptism of desire is a given; though I’d love to know if they managed to have him baptised with water – that he is one of the family. At the same time, I can’t imagine a better way to say to their other children that the newly born is one of the family. This is what you do when you think that the newborn is an immortal soul instead of something to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way as soon as practicable.

I can obviously imagine that for some people such a behaviour might seem weird, or ridiculous, or worse. But this is exactly the point, why this is the case. This can only be the case if to one life isn’t sacred, there is no immortal soul, and there is no infinite dignity and beauty in a birth even if, alas, followed by mourning.  Those who ridicule Santorum say, therefore, much more about themselves than what they want to imply about him.

Mundabor