By Jeremy Hyman
I decided to share my thoughts with you exactly as they came into my mind before the memorial service, without editing them.
“And it came to pass at the end of two full years” — two full years without Talia.
Two full years without the telephone calls wishing us “Shabbat Shalom” on Friday.
Two full years without the rolling laughter and the endless love.
Two full years without visits in the middle of the week and treats for the nephews.
Two full years without someone to remind us of everyone’s birthdays, and of her own as well.
Two full years without marvelling at her ability to cope and her determination to succeed.
But at the same time — two full years of returning to routine...
A return to ordinary life, more or less — family, work, friends.
Ordinary life that covers a heavy shock hidden very, very deep inside.
A shock that affects all of us — the brothers, parents, aunts, sisters-in-law, nephews, boyfriend, friends, those close and those farther away — an entire world of people.
Some of us consciously, and some subconsciously.
Some of us every day, and some less often.
And every news report about the loss of life — in war, from a serious illness or in yet another ordinary accident — now speaks to me in an entirely different way than before. It pinches me inside and returns me to the moment when I received the impossible news myself.
And I want to ask you: is there a difference between one loss of life and another?
Is death in war more tragic, or less tragic, than death on the road or in an industrial accident?
After all, the life of every person, whoever that person may be, is an entire world. So why, in our country, are there dead people who are worth more and dead people who are worth less?!
And if you say to me: well, obviously, a soldier killed in war was killed for the homeland; it is not the same as a civilian killed in an accident — then I shall ask you: did you know that most soldiers who die are not killed in battle, but from other causes such as accidents, illnesses and suicide? When we stand in silence on Memorial Day, we stand for them too. But there is no memorial day for those killed in road and industrial accidents, and the state does not honour their memory with ceremonies and a siren of remembrance.
But the question here is much deeper:
Why do we hear nothing about a foreign worker who falls from scaffolding and is killed?
Why do the death of one person in one accident, another person in a different accident and another in a third accident enter the statistics without creating any reverberation, while a single accident that happens to kill six people at once produces such extensive media attention, even though it changes almost nothing in the annual statistics?
Why do we, as a society, sanctify one kind of dead person while ignoring all the others, who were also young, beautiful and talented people with their futures before them?
These are the questions that have gnawed at my heart for two full years.
I am sorry, but I have no good answers — at least not yet.
This is what Talia’s death did to me.