By Karen Stiller

The other day I was reading about a Canadian mother of four who was killed in a car accident. She was driving to work, going about her business, when she was hit head-on by a truck.

She was killed instantly.

When I read stories like that, they hit close to home. I think about her kids losing their mother, living the rest of their lives without her. I think about the agonizing wound of loss they must feel. I imagine their shock and confusion.

I picture them crying in their beds.

Then I think about my own three kids. And I imagine them losing me. I can picture this because I drive alone in vehicles too. I’ve had near misses with accidents. I can make it real enough in my mind that I end up weepy on the yellow couch in my living room just imagining my own children without a mother. Take away their father too and it becomes simply too much to ever imagine at all.

Then I read that there are 12 million children living in sub-Saharan Africa who have been orphaned by AIDS. Twelve million. That is a number that conjures up big, dramatic words that writers don’t use very often—words like flabbergasted and staggering and breathtaking, but breathtaking in the very worse way. There are only 33 million people who live in Canada for God’s sake.

Twelve million children orphaned because of a disease that can be prevented is a number that I can hardly imagine. It is a number so huge it becomes almost meaningless. I just can’t picture it. But I don’t want to be someone who can’t imagine this—who can’t get weepy on my couch in the face of it. That would be easier on my mind, but in the end, harder on my heart. 

So, I try to picture these children all lined up. All 12 million boys and girls in a big line stretching across Africa, probably around Africa and up and down Africa there are so many of them. Twelve million of them.

When I picture these children together like that, it helps me to imagine individual faces and names and warm, sticky hands and the colour of their t-shirts. I picture the sun on their faces, so very hot. And I picture them talking to each other in the line, like kids like to do.

I imagine people walking along different parts of the line, warm and caring adults, handing out treats and cold water—tending is a good word for it—and stopping to chat and ask what someone’s name is. And do they have a favourite colour?  And is this your sister? Because boy does she ever look like you! I imagine the kids answering the questions and laughing shyly at all this unexpected interest.

Then, these children become real to me. Then I can relate. Because 12 million is a number of such gigantic proportions that, in the face of it, you are left feeling very aware that your number is just one.

But if you can be one of those adults I am picturing, engaged and interested, warm and loving—tending in the ways that we can from over here where we live, so very far away—then I guess one is all you really need to be.

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