Mourning the passing of lives unlived

AS one ages, one comes to sense a dwindling of days. It isn’t a traumatic realization but a gradual acceptance of the inevitable as the body sends messages of hesitation and moments of weakness.

The process is slow moving unless one is struck down suddenly by a catastrophic plunge into darkness without even the benefit of a last goodbye. Otherwise, time takes us gently by the hand and helps us reach the end of a life that, hopefully, has been well lived.

This is on my mind today not because I am death-haunted but because another young life has been terminated just as it had begun. I’m not talking abortion but the death of a baby found in a trash bin, there among the debris of the affluent in a throwaway cardboard box.

The infant, a boy, was tossed out like a half-eaten pizza because his mother, described by the manager of her apartment building as a sweet young woman, probably found it the best way to deal with an unwanted burden in her life. Specifics have yet to be dealt with.

The woman is 21-year-old Holly Ashcraft. She’s a student at USC, an expensive private university near which the baby’s body was found. This is no poor, ignorant street person, but a presumably intelligent third-year student at a university with lofty academic requirements.

Why she might have committed the crime she’s charged with and whether she had once before thrown away another infant born to her may be revealed in the coming weeks and months. But the larger issue, remaining like a cloud over heaven, is how the crime of baby killing reflects the insensitivity of a culture in moral freefall.

Only when large and dramatic events stir our souls do we respond with money and compassion. Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods wring us dry of tears, but we are able to abide them without a lot of personal fussing over the slower ravages of hunger, disease and torture in lands far away.

Even the war in Iraq, which threatens to drag on endlessly, has been relegated to lesser positions of newsworthiness in the rush of events that capture our interest.

An estimated 30,000 Iraqi civilians -- the “collateral damage” of military thinking -- have died in the war. More than 2,000 of America’s own sons and daughters have also perished in the clash of armies and shadows.

One can argue that freedom is often hard won, and that’s true. And we can observe with awe the courage Iraq’s citizens have displayed in walking down streets of danger to vote for a constitution that might one day benefit their descendants.

But constitution or not, the killings are bound to continue as ideas and positions meet head-on under a relentless desert sun, while we go about our business wondering if the terrorists, whom history may someday label revolutionaries or even patriots, will once more extend their private war against us over here.

So the beat goes on, and lost in all of this are the uncounted babies who end up in trash bins, Dumpsters and in plastic bags tossed on a roadside or buried alive in holes, not graves, dug into America’s vast landscapes.

This despite avenues open to people like Holly Ashcraft who can take their infants to the safe havens of hospitals or even fire stations, no questions asked.

Few statistics exist that would include Ashcraft’s abandoned son. There are no national numbers on thrown-away babies, partly because their fates are often unknown and also, I suspect, because they don’t vote, shop or watch television. We are what we buy in a profit-minded, commodity-oriented society.

There are few to mourn over a death without identity. We have become desensitized by a chaotic age to the pain of the tiniest among us, disposing of them like so much flotsam in a dark sea. No words will be said over their graves and no melancholy dirges played at their funerals.

These are souls lost to a culture that sheds lives as easily as it sheds yesterday’s fashions. The courts may or may not find Ashcraft culpable for the death of her baby. One wonders, whatever the outcome of the case may be, who the infant’s father was and whether he knew of his son’s fate.

Did they conspire to hide what they had created, or did she act alone to rid herself of a baby that was more nuisance than gift? We may never know. Justice can convict and confine, but it can’t always force final answers from participants in a crime. Silence too often follows guilt to the grave.

While I sometimes miss parents who died years ago, I am comforted that they died in old age, my father peacefully in his own bed and my mother locked in the darkness of her dreams. Neither suffered pain.

There is no comfort in the recurring deaths of newborns whose glimpse of sunlight is brief and whose taste of the world is almost nonexistent. I accept the fact of growing older, but I find it impossible to accept the killing of infants who have barely experienced the sweetness of life.

For them, and for what their deaths do to us, we should forever mourn.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.