Marathon of Grief

Boston is not a name that resonates kindly in my psyche. It is a city that is associated with too many problems, leaving me to rue that peace of mind is not a low hanging fruit. Even when I pass a local hairdresser, Boston Barbers, I sort of involuntarily recoil. On Monday the city, or at least its college, preoccupied me due to my awaiting the ruling from the SCOTUS conference on whether the Justices would hear our case in respect of the Boston College subpoena. As it transpired, our luck was out. Apart from delays we haven’t got much change out of the court system.

Yet our misfortune was hardly the worst news to emerge from Boston on Monday where three people lost their lives and many more were seriously injured in a no warning bomb attack as they gathered to watch the city’s annual marathon. Eight year old Martin Richard was among the dead. It is so easy to imagine his parents hugging him last Christmas in sheer appreciation of the fact that he was not a pupil at Sandy Hook. Now this crushing devastation descends upon them.

Martin Richard appealing for peace

I emailed a lawyer there that my wife and I are friendly with, expressing sympathy and hoping he and his family were nowhere near the scene of the carnage. He had heard the blast from his office but they are all safe.

It could have been at any location across the globe. Enniskillen in 1987 comes to mind, if only because it has been so indelibly seared into the cultural memory. Examples are legion from around the world of unsuspecting civilians crowded together for a major social event in the civic calendar being targeted for homicide.

Yet as horrendous as they are all such attacks don’t impact on us in the same way. Perhaps, to some degree, because of that mental association with the city, Monday’s blast in Boston grabbed my attention in a way that other bomb attacks tend not to.

Despite being cognisant of its occurrence the horrific death of 11 Afghan children earlier this month in a NATO bomb attack didn’t focus my concentration in the same way that the Boston explosion did. It was a much worse atrocity given the fatalities sustained and yet the mind didn’t linger around the scene of the crime for very long. Perhaps it is just the way we are as humans: culturally out of sight out of mind. Los Angeles, for example, seems that much nearer than Kabul even though in terms of physical proximity Kabul is closer.

Afghan child victims of a NATO bomb attack laid out prior to burial

But being culturally less close does not make people less real, less sentient, less human. The children slaughtered in Afghanistan are every bit as valuable and as conscious of pain as the eight year old child Martin Richard who was butchered as he stood with his mother and sisters watching his father run the Boston marathon. They all have the same right to life and there is no justification for depriving them of it. The parents who brought them into this world and who are now left to grieve all carry the same burden of loss.

The Boston marathon is over, completely overshadowed by the vicious attack on civilians. Now the more demanding marathon of grief begins. There is no finishing line.