I don’t watch a lot of news, the talking heads irritate me immediately. I did watch a bit of the Boston horror, I cried for the loss of life and limbs. The loss of innocence and security that will never return for those involved. I cry for the families who now have dead children. I mourn with the parents of the bombers. So unpopular I know, don’t I understand the magnitude of what their sons did, don’t I understand that it could have been my family destroyed?
Allow me to share what I do understand. The father’s cry of saying his son, the bomber, was an angel. It didn’t offend me, my heart broke for him. The father in his grief only remembers the toddler giggles, the little boy who ran to him to be held in his father’s arms. He cannot bear to allow the reality of the carnage his sons created. All fathers have dreams for their sons, becoming a murderer and terrorist usually isn’t on the list. So with the entire world hating him, his sons, his family, he shouts defiantly to the world that it couldn’t be his boy.
The mother who heard of her older son’s death by media, the constant reporting, the bloodshed, the firefight, I have to think that she too thought of the toddlers, the babies, the little boys who brought her flowers. For one moment enter her mind, one son dead, the other on the run. The media saying he is bleeding. I feel her chest pain, her inability to breathe without crushing pain. Her desire to put herself between her boy and death.
Mercy and compassion are not exclusive of justice. Justice needs to be served, bombing innocents is a heinous act. Shooting police officers to death and lobbing bombs at others is evil unleashed. I do not believe I will ever forget the pictures of bloody sidewalks, legless victims, terror on once serene faces. The younger son needs to be imprisoned, society needs to be kept safe from individuals who have no moral compass. But we can allow ourselves a moment of compassion for the parents without compromising justice.
Maybe the boys learned hate in their homes, maybe they were schooled in hate on their parent’s laps. Maybe the parents truly didn’t know what or who their sons had become, what they had grown into. Perhaps this is a horrid nightmare for them as well. We can’t say for sure, can we? We do know that they will most likely not see their youngest son for a long, long time if ever. When they think of him, it will be with pain and horror. The pictures they viewed will forever hang before their eyes. The picture of the little 8 year old boy killed in the bombing intrudes on their fitful sleep.
We cannot say with surety that we would never be so inhumane, that evil so dark does not exist in us. That is arrogance and pride. To deny the darkness allows it to creep into us, take root. Acknowledging the darkness in all humility should bring us to our knees, break our hearts, it should allow light in to expose the inky shadow that stalks us.
Allowing our hearts a momentary thought of sorrow for the bombers’ mother does not invalidate the horror her sons committed, it does not lessen their crime. It does not invalidate the misery of the families who are burying their dead, or the suffering of bodies that were once whole and now are missing limbs. It simply allows us to be human in a world that gives glory to its inhumanity.
I have a dead son too. He wasn’t a bomber or a murderer. He was gentle and kind. My heart is crushed in my chest, sometimes I cannot breathe without pain, that is my life now. I cannot fathom what her pain must be, her misery, I can hear her keening cry though. Perhaps I am the fool to feel her grief, to even waste a moment’s thought on her. After all she whelped demons, right? Must be her fault, right? Undeserving of a second of merciful thought.
We are both prisoners, she and I. Unlikely cell mates. Held in a prison of grief, unquenchable sorrow for our sons so different. Unbridled hate fueled the horror in Boston, perhaps a moment of unbridled mercy can stem the tide of such brutal hate.
Beautiful, as usual. I had many of these thoughts too. You raise your children in you same home cocoon but at some point you must let them out and you never fully know the experiences that affect them. It is so hard to let go, even at that stage.
I try to always remember, that when something like this happens, God has lost children on both sides of the equation…he mourns for all.
That should say “your safe…”