scarlet thread

Today was eclipsed by a funeral for a child Tian Yo’s age who died of cancer. Afterwards, I could only wonder that my little boy has been spared so much, while another woman’s little boy, the grandson of a sweet friend, did not survive. It brought to mind a poem written in the late T'ang Dynasty by Meng Chiao, the translation of which I read this evening.

Wanderer’s Song

The thread in the hand of a kind mother
Is the coat on the wanderer’s back.
Before he left she stitched it close
In secret fear that he would be slow to return.
Who will say that the inch of grass in his heart
Is gratitude enough for all the sunshine of spring?

I’ve concerned myself with marveling over Tian Yo’s journey to us and our journey to him. Many adopting parents refer to the “scarlet thread” leading to their little ones, perhaps because the image implies redemption. Our own thread is a cord binding many lives together. But back there, in his mother’s country, the yin of this yang grieves her loss, the little boy she did not see to manhood. Her cry is not unlike the one I heard at the funeral. Her grief may wane as YoYo blossoms in the riotous exuberance of a three-year-old boy, but it will surely wax fuller when he is old enough to understand that the scar on his belly traces his path away from her even as it mends him, and but for that chance condition of exstrophy, he might be with her still, and not with us. Both halves are part of his whole, both mothers will have loved and lost.

But for grieving another woman’s little boy lost, I would have missed it. YoYo’s birth mother wrapped him in what one nun called “a traditional red cloth” before sending him on. I’m left to wonder, as I watch him sleep, whether his mother meant to catch a glimpse of him on occasion, or to at least know how he fared. The scarlet thread in her kind hand is bound with ours.