The red doors.

“Do you want to wait out here or go in?”

Pondering the question my mother asked me didn’t seem to ever end. However, the answer started with those red doors.

Sitting outside on the ground in a doorway with no door, but what do you expect from a hospital in a third world country with the most rudimentary medical supplies. All the other doors had sheets over them as if that thin, transparent sheet would keep out all the lurking dangers. Not this doorway. This doorway had no sheet and looked out to the backyard of the hospital where a woman could be seen hanging clothes on a line to dry. Why is she out here? Does she live at the hospital? Is she a bed maid? Something elegant about her made my eyes lock onto her. Maybe the way she hung clothes or maybe the selfless act of taking care of other people even though she lived in a place where everyone stole from you whenever they could.

My eyes left her for a moment, because out of the corner of my eye I saw the red doors. They seemed untouched compared to the nearly destroyed barnlike building. They looked misplaced. The building looked like it stood there way before the hospital came along. The paint clung to life, but the building refused to let it. I didn’t have to walk in to know there were no windows to be found anywhere around the building. The sad looking building was exactly that. Sad. Dirty. Forgotten.

“We’re going over there,” my mom said, pointing to the sad building with those perfect red doors.

We walked on a path that lead us directly to those perfectly red doors. Standing there, starring at them is when my mother asked me if I wanted to stay or go in. I thought about whether or not I should, but then the answer came quickly and suddenly. Of course I didn’t want to go in there. Of course I didn’t want to see my grandfather’s frozen corpse. Of course I had to. I needed to.

I struggled to open the doors; not because the emotional pain I felt suffocated me, but because they weighed a million pounds. When I finally did manage to push them open the room showed another pair of doors. Those bland doors didn’t evoke any emotion. I didn’t even think twice about opening them, until I actually did. Instantly the smell of death smacked me in the face. The cold air hit my lungs sharply; sending shivers down my spine.

Then I saw the freezers. The lady at the front desk explained to us that the hospital didn’t have enough freezers for every body and some bodies had to be stacked on top of each other for space. I could feel the inside of my stomach pushing vomit up my throat. The thought of guessing at which freezer contained my grandfather’s body made me scared and like anyone, sick. Suddenly I was a contestant on a game show. Whoever picks the right freezer will win a new car, but there was no new car and the only prize was a corpse. The first freezer we chose was wrong and instantly we slammed the door shut. The next one was the one.

There he laid. In nothing but his underwear and luckily no one’s body sat on top of his. However, when we pulled the cold, hard slate his body was thrown on we realized something laid in between his legs. Wrapped and taped up it completely stumped us. We realized later it was someone’s baby.

We had to dress him. We put him on a surgeons table in the next room and pulled the clothe we brought for him out.

“Hold his legs up for me,” hesitantly my mother ordered me to help.

Doing what I was told, I grabbed his legs. They weighed as much as cinderblocks. They chilled my hands as I held them. They were squashy like gross potatoes. I was happy when his pants finally were forced on and I could put his legs down.

After dressing him the box waited for him. We weren’t allowed to just carry his body out of the hospital, so we supplied a handmade wooden box. It would do for the four hour drive to the city, where his body would be cremated. We gingerly put his body in the box and towed the wooden house outside.

The red doors closed.

I realize now how ironic the red doors were. They were painted red for a purpose. They told people what they blocked. What they held. They blocked death. They held in the pain and emotion of hurt. They were the doors between life and death, heaven and hell, relief and pain.