Baby Unmourned

Baby Unmourned by Al deAprix My college roommate once worked construction in a city to remain unnamed. One morning, the building’s cellar drain was plugged. The laborers dug it up, to clear out the obstruction. They found a dead baby… little more than a newborn. Its mother had pushed it down that pipe, probably hoping her baby would disappear, as if never born. I’ve wondered about that incident these many years. If she had loved her baby, and had she been too poor to otherwise do, why couldn’t she have secretly buried it in a pretty park, perhaps next to a shady tree, where she could have visited her child to dream of what might have been? What she did shocked me not for its inhumanity she did what was far too human. Our casual acceptance of such tragedies has been what distresses me. Life’s too frequently dismissed as something without value. Her baby seems not to have had any – it was just trash to be discarded. What would that life have brought, had it been allowed to continue? I have mourned that unknown baby these past decades. No one else did.