October 11, 2001
Living in the shadow of terror
Patricia Pearson
National Post
These are indefinable times, the mood of my nation is different than
anything I've ever observed. I felt it on Thanksgiving weekend, at the
county fair where my children ate candy apples and rode on ponies --and
the adults gazed at one another more meaningfully, with pointed
kindness, with unspoken offerings of reassurance: I am decent, I wish no
harm. I felt it at the dinner table, where my extended family
shared a turkey in unaccustomed quiet. I felt it in the streets strewn
with maple leaves, where my dog drifted from shrub to hydrant and my
little boy plucked marigolds from a lawn sporting the American flag, and
the dissonance of serenity and evil -- implied by the necessity of that
flag -- overwhelmed me. Shock, and the first urgent cascades of
conversation about Sept. 11 have given way to a pensive kind of
stillness. We face the fact that people we have never met, on whose
behalf thousands of us have even worked and advocated, hungrily wait to
dance upon our graves. We confront the remarkable knowledge that men are
busy, even as I write, finalizing their plans to kill as many of us as
they can. We took a while to wrap our heads around this, and
there's no shame in the delayed reaction, we aren't fools and sissies
because we at first, reflexively, tried to grapple with international
points of view. We are a generous and compassionate people who are
open-hearted and inquisitive, and humane to our core and there's pride
to be taken in that, not fault to be found. It's self-abnegating to
dismiss such civility. With wartime, however, comes a settling in
the bones, a gathering sense of weight. And sorrow comes, too, from
translating the abstraction of terrorist menace -- that seeming rhetoric
of media, that dry marshalling of intelligence data -- into an intimate
revelation of loss. If my little daughter lay on her bed with her
doll, and her Eloise book, and her new apple dress that she so adores
that she must wear it to sleep -- if she lay on her bed surrounded by
these beloved accompaniments, and rasped and sweated in the waning of
her small life as small pox or anthrax worked its horror on her
beautiful, milky skin and slender little limbs, and she asked me,
"Mommy, how do people get to Heaven? Do they walk?" And she asked me,
"Will I be better for my birthday party?" And she asked me, "did I get a
germ inside me?" I, her mother, omnipotent, in charge, able to
bring off the New Bike, and the Wonderful Party and the sustaining,
ever-lasting comfort of my arms around her waist, would say: "Yes
sweetie, yes you did get a germ." "Where did I get it?" she would
ask me, because she is insistently curious, because she has a lovely,
probing mind that I cannot now admit to her is squandered and futile and
dying, because someone from the other side of the world, who has never
looked into her wondrous, intelligent dark eyes, has decided to kill her
for being an Infidel. I cannot admit that to her because the betrayal
would be too immense, for her and for me. I would have to formulate a
sheltering lie, to keep her safe, not from her death but from her life.
From her remembered life in the moment of her dying. "You did not die,
Clara, because it made a man named Osama bin Laden strut about gleefully
in the dust of Afghanistan and rejoice at his victory for Islam. You
died, my cherished child, my inquisitive daughter -- discovering whether
worms have noses and how snow is made -- because God wanted you in
Heaven." And if I don't believe in Heaven, then I live the rest of
my existence in Hell, for the lie I shared with my daughter like a
secret, as she died in her bed in her favourite apple dress, in service
to the triumph of al-Qaeda. And so that Hell has already been
entered, for the mothers and fathers whose children were passengers on
the hijacked planes of Sept. 11. So it will be for more of us, barring a
miracle of perfect homeland and perimeter security in the coming
decades. It isn't only our soldiers, sent off to war who are going to be
murdered in the years to unfold, it is our children, our elderly, our
lame. There is no mercy, there are no ethics; it doesn't matter if we're
Muslims or Jews or Christians or Baha'is or Hindus, or women or men, or
a four-year-old girl so full of love that she would take the hand of bin
Laden himself and lead him to her room to show off her doll, before he
bent over with his revolting Mona Lisa smile and handed her a live
grenade. Is that real? The man has said as much. My daughter has
American blood, she was with me in New York this year, I take no comfort
in being one step removed and there is none to be had for my American
friends. But still, how can it be real? We can be forgiven, I think, for
taking all the waning days of summer to let the revelation of such
darkness come down.
©Copyright 2001, National Post
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