MEMORIAL DAY — My brain is just exploding this morning with
emotions about Memorial Day, and I have to get some of them down or
I will lose what’s left of my mind.
Saturday night I was in Arlington, Virginia, at the annual
meeting of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. This is a
fine group founded by Bonnie Carroll to get widows, widowers,
mothers, fathers, and children of men and women who have died in
the war on terrorism together. Last year I spoke and there were
about 500 people in the audience. Saturday there were 700.
Bonnie Carroll, a stone genius, spoke gloriously. Magnificently.
An angel of oratory. A staggeringly beautiful woman named Joanne
Wrobleski, who had just been married to her husband for two years,
spoke with power and rage and healing as a projector showed photos
of her wedding to her astonishingly handsome husband. It was enough
to melt a marble pillar.
A woman next to me named Mrs. Beard told about losing her son,
Bradley. I asked her if she worked at a job. She said she used to
be a bank teller, “but that after I lost my son, counting people’s
money didn’t seem that important anymore.” Her husband, a
homebuilder, looked distraught. Their beautiful daughter played the
piano and sang songs she had composed of peace and loss.
At every table, we passed around boxes of Kleenex
continuously.
I spoke briefly and talked about how the loved ones missing from
this dinner were the only people doing meaningful work in the world
today as far as I could tell. The media try to tell us their work
has no meaning, and when the media do this, it’s almost like grave
robbing.
Anyway, I spoke and then I hugged widows and bereft mothers for
about an hour and a half. A man named Nolan Rappaport who has been
a close friend since 1956 accompanied me and took photos. He was
very patient and when I thanked him for his patience, he said,
poetically, “I don’t feel as if the time was lost.”
When I got back to Los Angeles, I started to read a book I can’t
finish, called A Writer at War by Vassily Grossman, a
correspondent with the Red Army newspaper during World War II.
The part I can’t get past is the atrocities of the Germans
towards the Jews when they took the Ukraine in the early part of
World War II. One incident just haunts me every day.
The Germans came upon a kosher butcher. They asked him if he
were really a good butcher. He said he hoped he was. They brought
his two small sons to him and said, “Show us. On your sons.”
I keep putting the book down at this point and wondering, “Why
did God bother making creatures as wicked as man?”
Then I picked up a book of interviews with Bob Dylan. They were
interesting. He’s a clever con man and huckster and poet of the
obscure and sometimes the meaningless. It’s called The
Essential Bob Dylan Interviews, edited by a man named Jonathan
Cott. I recommend it. I also have with me a book called Heart
of a Hawk about coping with losing a son in Iraq. It’s by a
woman I met at the event on Saturday, a lovely soul named Deb
Tainsh. I have already read it and it’s major stuff about loss and
faith and pain.
And I thought, well, here’s Bob Dylan, making jokes and making
fun of his interviewers and he’s a Jew. And here I am sitting at my
computer with my dogs snoring nearby and my palm trees and my
bottled water. And I’m a Jew. And why do we — Jews and Gentiles
here in America — get to do what we do instead of being killed by
the Nazis or the Islamic terrorists?
Because of Bonnie Carroll’s husband and Bonnie Carroll. Because
of Joanne Wrobleski and her hero husband. Because of all of the men
and women at Arlington National Cemetery and on ocean floors and
blown to bits in forests and muddy trenches. Because God made
Eichmann, but he also made Bradley Beard and Dale Denman, Jr.
More are dying as we speak every day in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
How do we ever make it up to them? How can we ever pay them
back? Above all, by taking the loved ones they left behind into our
arms, into our hearts, and loving them forever. And by making sure
that when they die, their deaths are known to have meaning.
We would be nothing without them. Nothing. And somehow I feel as
if my brain were still on fire.
