A few weeks back I dreamed about a man names Ahmed Haroun. He was the local carpenter in the town we lived in just across the border, before we evacuated; he built all the doors and windows in our house as well as a rough island just the right height for kneading bread in my kitchen. He was also our good friend. We visited each other’s homes on holidays and laughed over the kind of jokes that transcend language barriers. He is a stout man with a beard. For some weird reason I always thought he looked like a dark North African version of one of those traditional of St. Nicolas’ - stern and a little bit intimidating but undeniable kind. When we evacuated, our families each had baby girls just a few months apart. His was named Eliza, after me.
The night we evacuated, in the early hours of the morning when we were calling friends between packing and cleaning, we called Ahmed Haroun. He was in a town further North, a touchy place to be considering his open affiliation with the rebel movement. When Bryan called, his wife answered the phone. She said she was holed up in their house with the children listening to gunshots outside. She didn’t know where Ahmed Haroun was. Hours later we flew out and left everything, and everyone, behind.
In the months that moved into a year after we left North Africa, Ahmed Haroun was one of the few people we couldn’t make contact with. We made a few trips back and then in April finally moved back and started setting up our lives again. In all that time we heard rumors that he was alive and that his family were well, but we hadn’t seen him with our own eyes.
In my dream he just walked in our front gate, calmly, like he had done dozens of times before. The dream was significant enough that I mentioned it to Bryan the next morning, but all in all I didn’t think much of it. But two or three days later that is exactly what happened. I looked up to see a man walk through our gate. I turned to Bryan and said without thinking, “If I didn’t know better I would think that was a thinner version of Ahmed Haroun.” And lo and behold it was.
We sat and talked for a couple hours over tea. We talked about how his family got to safety and about his now-pregnant wife. We talked about the furniture we will need built for our new house. We talked about politics and laughed a little about the things we all left behind. And somewhere in the course of the conversation, much later than we should have, we asked about his baby. And with calm sadness, he told us how Eliza had died.
A few nights ago my little sister Abigail (who is here for a visit!) and I were watching the Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe in it. At some point in the film all the women and children and old people of Nottingham are rounded up and hustled into a wooden building that is set alight. There are several tense minutes of smoke rising through the floorboards and people screaming as the heroes rush to save the townsfolk. They do, of course, eventually save everyone; but before that moment comes when everyone stumbles out happily safe and alive, one of the women in the burning building frantically shuffles her little baby through a gap in the boards into the hands of a stranger in an attempt to save his life. The scene is brief and peripheral to the larger narrative. But when that moment came, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breath. I literally had to turn away from the screen and concentrate on some trivial object on the table while I tried to choke down the sob in my chest. Even my incredibly tender-hearted sister had a understandable giggle at my overreaction. My emotion caught me completely off-guard, but I went to bed that night with a sick feeling in my heart. I couldn’t stop thinking about that baby, and his mother who thought she was about to die.
I don’t claim to have ever lived through great trauma in my life. I want to give the griefs and loss I have known their proper due, and I think I do that, but an honest look at my life shows no great violence committed against me or someone in my immediate family. My parents, siblings and children are all alive. I haven’t even been in a car wreck, for goodness sake.
And yet, I am living shoulder-to-shoulder with many, many people who have been through trauma, who have been hurt, who have lost children...and I think I am realizing that some of that pain rubs off on me whether I realize it or not. There is a slow motion, slow-growing, slow-accumulation of hurt that collects in the hollows of my heart while I am not paying attention. While I happily change the diapers of fat babies, or laugh over a joke with a friend, or cook supper for a hungry husband, sadness trickles into me without me ever feeling it. I don’t even know it’s there until I sit down with a bowl of popcorn to watch Russell Crowe shoot a few arrows and suddenly I am fighting off a panic attack.
My friend Leah is a counsellor and has taken part in several trauma healing workshops in this part of the world. When I saw her last she mentioned how she is learning more and more about the spiritual discipline of grief. She only mentioned it in passing, and at the time I wasn’t in a place to engage the thought fully. But I have been chewing on it for a while now. And the thought that maybe there is something godly about grieving things worthy of great sorrow intrigues me. It comforts me. And scares me a little too.
I don’t really know how to end this blog. I have been staring at the screen for a while now, trying to think of some profound or at least tidy way to close this up. But I’ve got nothing. I could say something heart-wrenching about a dead baby named after me, but the truth is I only held her once I think. I didn’t really know her. I could say something about the tragic lives of refugees in war-torn Africa, but that rings vaguely off to me too. There are tragedies everywhere - yes, here more than many places - but I am constantly fearful of painting over the beauty that is here, or ignoring the pain somewhere else. I’m not sure what all this is about tonight. Just a story I wanted to tell, I guess. Ahmed Haroun’s and a thousand others’ like him.
And to be honest, it’s partly mine too.
Maybe more than anything tonight I am just realizing that these things don’t go away. These stories that aren’t mine claim me, and these memories I don’t remember play in my mind over and over again. And even as I grow desensitized to story after heartbreaking story, something inside me is rawer than I realized.
