On April 24, 2013, an eight story commercial building collapsed in Bangladesh.
1,129 people died. 2,515 injured people were rescued.
The building contained clothing factories, a bank, apartments and several shops.
The bank and shops on the lower floors immediately closed when cracks were found in the building. Warnings were issued to stop using the building after the cracks appeared; these warnings were ignored by the garment factories. Garment workers were ordered to return the following day.
The building collapsed during the morning rush hour.
I was sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my turn at bat with the physician's assistant, after returning from my glorious McDonald's breakfast and solitary reverie.
I started flipping through Time magazine's annual "The Year in Pictures" issue.
The first picture I came across stopped me dead in my tracks.
A Bangladesh couple, buried in the rubble, embracing in death.
I could not turn the page.
It is without a doubt the most haunting photograph I have ever seen.
Eventually I kept my finger in that page as I leafed through other pictures. I kept skipping back.
When my name was called I flipped back one more time and seared that image into my mind and my heart and my soul.
The bodies are buried from the waist down. The woman's back is arched, her head is tipped back, her right arm, bent at the elbow, lies across her right breast, touching the top of the man's head.
The man's left arm is wrapped around her body, his left hand behind her back. His head rests on her right breast. Blood trickles from his left eye like tears.
These people died because their employer did not give a damn about their safety. If you think that cold-hearted employer mentality does not exist in America you are a fool.
These people had to go to work. They needed the job, they needed the money. To their employer they were nothing but cheap labor. Cheap lives.
Nameless, faceless. Expendable.
In the face of unspeakable horror, looking into death's eyes as the harshest of truths stared back, they had each other. They had love.
What else do we need to know?
They wrapped their arms around each other and died. I don't know how to get at this, I am not quite sure what to say.
Love. Love, for Christ sake. Nothing else matters. We all know that. We know it because of the comfort we feel in our soul when a loved one comforts us nakedly, openly, with honesty exposed and the soul vulnerable.
Those moments you experience, if you are lucky enough, when you drop the defenses and reveal your true humanity to another and that trust is rewarded with love.
Nobody cared about these people. They were just a number. Just bodies to fill spaces to produce product. Bodies to be exploited and abused.
But they knew in their hearts that they were more than that. They understood their own humanity, they had dreams, they had hope.
They probably spent more time every day in that soul-less factory than they did actually living their lives. I picture them, in the brief moments they had together at home, plotting and planning a life. Talking about what they wanted, luxuriating in what made them happy.
However small.
Ultimately, when death came calling, when their employer brazenly signed their execution warrant, they wrapped their arms around each other in love.
They stared death down in love.
It feels like the ultimate declaration of love to me. And the ultimate testimony to the power of love.
A mind blowing, raw truth moment getting right to the heart of what life is.
That's what I got out of that picture. That's what I got out of that powerful cross section of love and death.
Google it yourself.
See what it does for you.
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