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All of this wasn't new to me.
The death and the grief that follows.
It is not a feeling one wants to remember.
Louis was no stranger to death. In fact, he was unwantingly intimate with it.
He had seen it, lingering, like an unwanted houseguest in the homes of the sick. And though it remains forever unseen, its effects on people were far more obvious.
Lethargy tugged at a person's body like a puppeteer stringing along marionettes. Helpless to fight. Limp limbs hanging on a flaccid body, like a person that had been hanged.
Disease defaced the features and mind of a once healthy person, distorting them into a being of sickness. Unable to properly function, it was watching the living dead. An oxymoron but weirdly suited to what appeared before him.
The cures, if one could even call them that, didn't help either. Curse the disease away they did not, rather, they gave calling cards freely to death. If death was crawling to claim a soul, the cures were practically beckoning it to careen.
It was futile to do anything. He could only watch as patients slowly waste away, waiting for the inevitable.
That may have been why he had been so broken over the deaths of 3 of his children. Jeanne was gone first. Curious, playful Jeanne. He remembered her loss of appetite, the sudden stabs of pain through her abdomen. The lethargy pulling at her limbs and the aches she had endured. Not to mention the fever she had accumulated too. She was so young and full of life, wanting nothing more than to play with her siblings or to wander into his laboratory. But she could not do that now.
She died at the age of 9.
Then there was Camille. Sweet, darling Camille. He remembered the loss of appetite, sudden stabs of pain through his abdomen. The nausea his little body had endured. And jaundice's tint making itself known, like a pest creeping up on his skin. This was not helped by his wailing of pain, and Louis' helplessness in trying to sooth him. His eyes, once full of joy, were now in terror, desperately trying to understand why he was in so much pain, wanting his dear papa to save him from its clutches. But it was all in vain.
He was gone at the age of 2.
Finally, there was Cécile. Brilliant, ambitious Cécile.
Her death haunted him the most. She wished to continue boarding school, wanting to emulate her father and follow in his footsteps. But that is no longer possible. For she too, was gone, dying in the same way as her older sister, Jeanne. She was 12.
He could almost feel their confusion, their fear. Silently, hauntingly, begging for their beloved father, their brilliant father, to do something, ANYTHING, to help them get this pain away. Something to make them feel better. The fear was reflected so poignantly in their eyes that he had seen but never experienced in the faces of his patients. That fear had overtaken him when he died, and it never left.
And Louis?
What could he do?
He could do nothing but helplessly watch.
Perhaps that was why he was close to a certain Charles Darwin. Like Louis, he was also a father. And unfortunately, like Louis, he was also a man haunted by the ghost of death still. And maybe, just maybe, that was why he dived into the field of microbiology.
Was it out of a want to protect others from the grief he endured as a father?
Was it out of a want to atone for a helplessness he inherited not by choice?
He didn't have an answer for it.
After all, wasn't grief an act of love in its own right?
Now, sitting there in an underground bunker, with a war raging outside, hearing casualties announced on the radio as if it was a normal part of life, Louis felt his children's ghosts come back to haunt him. The announcements reminded him of the deaths he was unable to stop, and the people he couldn't save. It was saddening and helplessness-inducing. Here he was, many years into the future, with medical advancements far beyond his imagination. Shouldn't they be properly utilized to help people?
This isn't the first time I have looked death in the eye. So why have I never gotten used to its grasp?