When Death Comes to Your City

It's happened before. Agony, tears. Two precious boys. One lived next door to me; the other one the child of people in our community.

It happened again. A son of the city has fallen in battle in Gaza. There's a routine to how this works, practiced so many times, it runs very smoothly. They come to the door of the parents' house. If there are siblings who live away from home, the army coordinates to have someone there. The knock will take place in multiple cities. 

For one, the knock was delivered in the United States; the brother whisked off to a waiting El Al plane to bring him home. For another, the daughter was already on a plane, so the pilot was alerted and the Internet on the plane was shut down. Upon landing, her uncle was waiting to tell her. 

The knock comes with a support team. Perhaps a local person, a friend, a trusted spiritual leader. The team from the army verifies where the person lives so they don't accidentally knock on the wrong door, terrify the wrong person. 

Once there was a knock on my door at 6:00 in the morning. I opened the door to find a policeman. It's important to know, though in that second all previous knowledge vanishes. It's never one person who comes to the door - always at least two. It's not a policeman. It's an army officer. 

An ambulance is often waiting out of sight in case it is needed. If not, you'll never know that the army had made arrangements just in case. From there, as with the family today in Maale Adumim and three other places, the army has seen to everything. The vehicles to get the family to the cemetery, the other soldiers in the unit to come and support the family and a million details. 

The town people take to the street and stand waving Israeli flags as a sign of support, as a sign of thanks, as a sign of love. It is likely, please God may I never know, that the family sees this and hopefully is comforted but really, there is no comfort.

The burial is an agony. He was too young too die, too beautiful, too critical to their family. Sometimes there are grieving parents, sometimes a devastated spouse and perhaps even children. There is no preparation for this moment when you stand before hundreds of people and try to summarize the devastation.

There are silly questions people ask, well intentioned but impossible to answer. The most common might well be, "how are you?" or "how are you doing?". Even "what can I do to help?" is too complicated in these early moments, or perhaps even for months. 

When death comes to your city, without warning, all you can do is stand and pray that the families find something to comfort them, something to hold on to. All you can do is hold on. For me, in a selfish way, after two months of terrifying days and nights, my youngest son came home last week. 

But there is no escaping the horrors of this war and already the world has forgotten that this was not a war we started, not a war we wanted. There isn't a country in the world who would not have gone to war after the brutal massacre of 1,200 of its people in a single day of terror. Only Israel is held to the standards of being forced to risk the lives of our soldiers to save the lives of those who invaded our land and murdered our people.

For now, we mourn again the loss of four young men and my city, again, joins the nation in burying a son.