While one father buries his family, a young son salutes his fallen father. What do these pictures tell us about loss, parenting, and finding peace after the death of our most precious loved ones?
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While one father was laid to rest in New York, surrounded by hundreds of police, servicemen, and his family, another father, thousands of miles away, continues to mourn his sons and wife.
The iconic image of the small body of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, on the coast of Turkey in September brought the world’s attention to the refugee crisis as well as stories of smugglers, starvation, and the journeys from a war-torn region to better days, one hoped, in Europe or the West. In contrast, another iconic image of little Ryan Lemm saluting his father, Air Force Tech Sergeant Joseph Lemm, during his funeral service at the end of 2015 tells a different story of a hero’s farewell. Sgt. Lemm was a hero who served New York during and after 9/11, and finally as a soldier in Afghanistan.
One father, Adbullah Kurdi, lost his sons and wife while fleeing from unimaginable violence while one boy buried his father because of another war that he could not escape.
If only we could have prevented either of these pictures. If only these boys could have met on a playground during recess. If only these fathers could have lived next to each other and shared a moment on adjoining properties, talking about things they loved.
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It’s always the same few things give me real pause in my thinking life—the brevity of life, the pain of loss, and the hopelessness we possess to save each other at the end. Gallows humor and a sense for deeper, darker things have always been shades to my character, and I’ve never shied away from difficult talks with anyone.
But these pictures—they do me in.
A child, lost forever in the ether, and a father’s inability to bring that child back—I just can’t deal. I don’t want to deal. I’ve thought about it too much as a father, preparing for some unfortunate future, lost between Hemingway’s (attributed) assertion that the saddest and shortest story was “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn” or in the notes in my teacher’s text on Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lost his mind and passion after his young son died.
That’s why this year when the media coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis took hold, and the picture of poor, young Alan Kurdi on the shores were everywhere, I just couldn’t look.
How could anyone?
But they did. They looked, took pictures, stared, and even created memes to guilt each other into one view or another. You’d think people would have a sense of the weight of such a thing, but no.
And then young Ryan Lemm, saluting his father, readying for a long life without a father, just doing the only thing any kid can do when the reality of a thousand cops hoisting your father’s casket up to be honored. He saluted.
What else would he do?
There is hopelessness, power, and an existential, illusive mandate in these pictures and stories that make me hold my children tighter and wish for a long life before my own death, if only so that I can be there for them, even if the whole world is already there in my absence. The world can’t be their father, but a father can be their world. Or at least I hope, and want, and need.
I don’t want to burden my young children with the prospect that they will have to grow up not knowing my presence next to theirs. I also never want to host the idea that their young, amazing bodies will serve as symbols for the world at large that constantly feeds itself on the blood of the innocents, where the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best do nothing except take pictures and shake their heads in shallow helplessness.
I wish I could demand that somehow the lives of children are sacred, that no child has to flee war or see his father become a casualty of it.
But this is the way it is, since time immemorial. The Classics only tell one story, and that is the story of sacrifice—of our sons and fathers.
It just won’t do.
We owe our children—and our fathers—better stories, and a better world.
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Photo: Abhisek Sarda/Flickr
The iconic photos mentioned in the essay can be seen here and here.