By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A 12 year-old girl from Jhorpara, India deliberately committed suicide in order to donate her organs to sick family members and to spare her family the expense of providing a dowry.
The Times of India is reporting that Mumpy Sarkar came up with the plan to kill herself after listening to her parents discuss how only eye surgery could save her father’s vision. In addition, her brother Monojit had one damaged kidney and the other was getting weaker. Unfortunately, her father, Mridul Sarkar, did not make enough money to cover such expensive surgeries.
“The family had approached the local MLA for help. We had decided to grant them some money for the boy’s treatment. But the tragedy happened all of a sudden,” said Tapas Tarafdar, a village council leader, to the Times.
In Mumpy’s mind, the perfect solution to save her family was to kill herself, which would provide the kidney her brother needed and spare her father the expense of having to provide a dowry for her later in life.
And so, on June 27, Mumpy told her older sister, Monica, about her plan to kill herself that day in order to save the family. Monica thought she was kidding and went off to school. The girls’ father was at work and their mother had gone to fetch rice.
“Finding herself alone at home, Mumpy consumed Thiodan, a pesticide, Tarafdar said. “Then, she ran to meet her father, who was about half a kilometer away. She told him that she had dreamt that someone had poured poison into her mouth and her stomach ached. Her alarmed father took her to a local pharmacy immediately where she was given some medicines. But her condition worsened soon and she had to be rushed to the local Baranberia hospital.”
From there, she was transferred to yet another hospital, but by then, she had died.
This tragic story takes yet another a sad twist. On the day after Mumpy’s body was cremated, her parents found a suicide note on her bed. In it, the child requested that they use her eyes and kidney to treat her father and brother. But it was too late.
The family was now inconsolable, and her mother was left in a state of shock.
“We were too late in understanding the feelings of a very sensitive child,” her father wept.
However, Mumpy’s selfless act generated such a storm of media attention that a local state council representative has now promised financial help for the treatment of both Mridul and his son Manojit.
In spite of all the tragic twists and turns, Mumpy’s dying wish to save her family is about to come true after all.
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
