HUMANITY

Standing Over Our Children’s Coffins

It is the only way I can imagine an end to the violence

“In moments of pain, we seek revenge.” — Ami Ayalon

I sat in an English cemetery.

I was twenty, single, and years away from having children.

I find solitude in graveyards. One cannot help to reflect on life when surrounded by people who have past. They speak to me in their silence. They remind me.

As I sat on the bench in the English town of Stow-on-the-Wold, I noticed a diminutive tombstone nestled between two others. I approached the gravestone and read the inscription. It was of a child who had died at the age of five.

I didn’t know the child. The dates indicated he died on the same day as my birthday. Death, particularly of a young person, brings profound clarity in life. While sitting there I contemplated my own life.

But I could not stop looking at the place where that child was buried. I quit considering my own mortality and only felt for this little one who had left the world too soon.

He had done nothing wrong to die so young.

Years later I would lose my brother to cancer.

I was married and a father by this time. The loss of a sibling is tragic. I was devastated and fell into depression. Yet, while I was heartbroken, I could only gaze upon my newly born son and consider my life if I lost him. I could not imagine how my parents felt in losing their child.

We now have two children. They are seventeen and twenty, healthy, active. A day never passes when I don’t get a shudder of fear when I consider losing them before I die. I don’t live in constant dread. But as a parent, these thoughts are inevitable and unavoidable.

We lie next to our babies as they sleep, sometimes leaning in to ensure they are still breathing. With great love comes the possibility of great loss.

It is this love for my children that gives clarity.

I recently wrote a dystopian novel of hope that was in essence a love letter to my children. I wanted to convey to them the feeling of losing a sibling without, of course, them ever having to experience it.

I wish death on no one. Yet death offers us the greatest clarity on life as it resets our perspective and priorities. But we are only ever mostly affected by the loss of those closest to us.

This is the dilemma as we cannot ever be wholly empathetic to all loss in the world. We can have sympathy for a death that happens halfway around the world. But unless it was someone close to us it will not have the same impact.

But that child who died in a distant city or land was just as loved as our own. There should be no difference. The loss is equivalent.

Yet the pain is contextual.

This is why it is easy to support hostile actions that are outside of our realm. As long as our children aren’t involved, it is easy to speak pragmatically. It is this emotional disconnect that allows so much violence to flourish.

So imagine standing over your child’s coffin.

The only way for me to have any clarity in conflicts is to imagine how I would feel if my child died as a result of that conflict.

We don’t play this game because it is too much for us to process. Out of self preservation we can only feel so much. If I felt the same way for every child in the world as I do for my own, the loss would shatter my soul a thousand times over.

I would feel sorrow beyond explanation if I lost a child. If it was a senseless death from war or other violence, I may feel a need for justice. But that anger would fade as the only truth is that my child is dead. Nothing will bring them back.

No matter what we do, none of the children killed in the recent conflict will come back to those who loved them. Each of those children had parents, friends, and family members who cared for them deeply.

This makes the path forward quite clear for me. My children are no different than any of the children who have died in war. Those children just happened to be in the wrong place that was beyond their control.

If I had to make a choice whether to send my child to war, I would not. I see this current war as senseless. Actually, all wars are senseless. If the choice was war or my child’s life, the decision is clear.

The problem is that the people calling for war are not sending their own children to fight. With very few exceptions, they will never be standing over their children’s coffins.

They send other children to fight their wars. They bomb other people’s children.

This disassociation from humanity is what drives so much depravity.

The senseless vitriol that flourishes on social media adds to the violence and hate. We don’t like to consider that we are responsible for the violence as we espouse our truths and degrade others because they don’t agree with us.

Years ago in Oakland, CA, a driver got angry because the car in front of them was driving too slowly. They pulled up alongside the car and shot at the driver. The other driver was an older woman. Her five-year-old grandson was in the back seat. He was hit and killed by the bullet.

I always consider what would have happened if the hateful driver pulled up to the car preparing to shoot but then saw that it was his mother and little brother in the back seat. Would he have shot?

Of course not.

And it is through this lens that we should always be looking at the world.

The current conflict will have no winners.

There have already been a combined 12,000 deaths, most of these have been innocents. There will be more deaths. And then there will another war. One side will claim victory. The next side will win in the future. Back and forth.

Detached and from afar, we can speak with politicized and righteous voices. Each side tells the other they are wrong, they started it. Back and forth.

This violence will not end with violence. Those making the decisions don’t believe this. They feel they will eventually win even though this current situation hasn’t been resolved for 6,000 years, and wars have raged for the last 75.

We need to put politics and rhetoric aside or the only legacy left to future generations will be more and more deaths.

This is simple but not easy to do. But there is no other choice.

We see daily images of parents cradling their dead child or draped over a casket. They don’t care who started the war. They desperately only wish it had never begun.

I imagine myself standing over my child’s coffin, crying.

That offers me everything I need to know.