Coping Since Sept. 11
NPR Listeners Reflect on Life After National Tragedy

Robin Shain

I am driving down a rural road that curves to the right, past a farmhouse with a fishing boat for sale in the yard. My four-year-old spies the boat from the back seat, and asks if we can go to the lake when it's warmer. I tell him we can. He's inquisitive this afternoon, even chattier than usual. As we approach a cemetery, I decide it's a good time to explain what it is.

'That's a cemetery,' I say casually. 'When people die, we bury them in the ground so we have a place to go and remember them.' He mulls the thought. I decide against muddying the waters by discussing cremation, lest the thought of burning bodies alarm him. For all of his talk about being a 'big boy,' he is still too young to truly comprehend death.

I think of his great-grandmother who died when he was an infant. Hoping to avert any anxiety about our weighty subject, I add, 'After we die, we're surrounded by people who love us.'

'But not everyone loves us, Mommy,' he says -- his words prescient beyond his years.

The serene hills I had just been admiring, lavish with amber trees glinting in the sunlight, become awash with thoughts of terrorism, like a canvas defiled. I had almost forgotten, if only for a moment, about our turbulent times. One small observation from one small boy reignites my horror over what has already occurred, and my dread for what may lie ahead.

Yet of all the feelings rushing back again -- the somber thoughts haunting me every day since Sept. 11 -- I cannot bring myself to hate. When I hear about Afghan children and hospital patients slain by misdirected American bombs, or of Taliban casualties, I don't want to dance in the streets and celebrate, no matter how deep my grief since Sept. 11 may reach. Growing up in this country did not teach me to rejoice over the death of innocent victims or even declared enemies. For all of its flaws, my country never taught me to hate.

As rows of flowers and tombstones flash past my car windows, almost blurring in the distance, my son's words weigh heavy in the air.

'You're right,' I finally say. 'Not everyone loves us. But we don't hate them back.'

'We don't hate them back,' he echoes as the cemetery disappears from view.

Robin Shain
Little Rock writer

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