Twenty-nine years old. Georgetown graduates. Believing with every fiber of their being that people are essentially good. Dead on the side of a mountain road, somewhere very far away. Tajikistan.
I am the mother of a twenty-nine year old Georgetown graduate. They had walked the same streets, maybe even lived in the same dorm. I have a son, who will turn twenty-eight tomorrow, who lives somewhere very far away. Not in a place that ends in "istan" -- that suffix that, well, I can't help it, automatically touches a nerve. My youngest now lives in New York. Some might think of that as a dangerous place, or even a place far away. I do not. Every day, though, I worry about all of them. I am their mother, and that's what I do.
I vaguely remember hearing the story a few days ago, about the random killing of some tourists in a place far away. ISIS had claimed responsibility. No, that's not right. That sounds too much like remorse, like holding oneself accountable for a horrible deed. They were not claiming responsibility. They were taking credit. I had heard the story and tucked it neatly away, in that safe place where I can ignore horrible stories about things that happen to other people, things that have nothing to do with me. It might very well have remained there, had I ignored the brief New York Times teaser that had popped up on my phone yesterday, something about a dream ending on a mountaintop.
The story stopped me in my tracks. The nameless and faceless victims were no longer tucked away. They were idealistic. They were in love. They had shed their creature comforts and their good jobs and were living out their world view. A world view that was populated by good hearted people and beautiful vistas and serendipitous encounters that could never happen if you spend your life in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. They probably held onto that world view until the end, even as the band of thugs, in cars packed with guns and knives, bore down on them and mowed them down, then came out to finish the job.
Somebody's child died, brutally murdered, on the side of that dusty mountain road in a place called Tajikistan. Only a few days earlier, some local folks had brought the bikers flowers, entertained them with some music. It was enough, despite the grueling trek, the occasional unpleasant incidents along the way, to reinforce their optimistic and maybe slightly naive world view. As a mother, I'm torn. I would love to know that my own children have that kind of outlook, that people are good, that there are impossibly beautiful views that should not be missed, that it would be a shame to miss it all, or any of it. As a mother, though, I want to shackle them to their computers, move them into a house a stone's throw away from mine, somewhere close where I can know, every night before I go to bed, that they are safe. I admit it. I want them to be jaded and cynical and conventional and bored. If it means they'll be alive.
"And in the end it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years." Abraham Lincoln said that, and lots of other folks have repeated it. A piece of me believes that to be true. As a mother, though, I can't quite shake the idea of the shackles.
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