Hezbollah Funeral

I visited Lebanon in 1996 with my husband. I was a new bride, barely twenty, and this was my first trip out of North America. My husband was older than me and due to the wars, had not been back to see his parents for nearly 10 years. They were ecstatic to see him and greeted me warmly with great affection.

It was a “dangerous time” for an American, and my family did not want me to go. But it was a quiet time relative to all that has happened there.

One of the first things we did was visit the mass grave site in Qana, where Israel had massacred more than 100 civilians months before. I had never seen anything like it. The UN had taken pictures, and they were horrific. There were mementos still up of all the victims, but there were also pictures of UN Soldiers holding up various body parts, afterwards. One soldier held up a leg. Another held the severed-off top of a child’s body. Many of the victims were children, and I remember all the teddy bears lined up on the grave like a nursery.

A relative drove us into the area of Hezbollah where they used to be prohibited. We couldn't go all the way because the soldiers warned us of bombings. So we went up through villages of destroyed homes and Hezbollah flags.

We went to another southern area where the soldiers stopped us. It's too close to the border, my husband said, and so primarily black, presumably African UN soldiers stood at checkpoints with wide smiles and friendly English. Their looks were so different from the black men I saw holding up legs and arms in disgust, putting babies into bags that were too big.

We saw three Irish UN soldiers who joked with me about it not being safe to eat sunglasses. I was gnawing anxiously on my husband’s glasses. I hated to drive there, especially on narrow, winding rocky roads where life means close to nothing. My husband would point to areas on top of mountains and say, "Israel is there" and after 20 days, I had to tell myself to feel nothing.

I had never experienced fighter jets above my head constantly, and I asked his family, Why don’t you just shoot them down? In America, we would never stand for that! We would just shoot them down and it would be done.

They said they could not do that.

Further into our visit, another boy was killed randomly by Israel, and we decided to go to the funeral. My mother-in-law gave me a head scarf to cover up my hair, and we went down with another relative to a mass of people. Mourners came from villages all around, swarming to the funeral. There were thousands of people there, many of whom were Hezbollah, and I worried that Israel would bomb us all while we were standing out there so vulnerable. If they could kill children, they certainly would have no qualms about killing me or anyone else. I kept looking at the sky nervously.

This boy was a hero for them. A dark eyed, beautiful child, not more than 15. His only crime was being in the wrong place at a terrible time. The Hezbollah marched in front shouting and hitting their chests. My husband said they were saying they would love to die as him, for God, for Lebanon. Other men marched behind quietly. Fewer women followed.

My husband brought me to the dug out grave while they marched. Near the front, they held up his body, wrapped in a yellow Hezbollah flag. Behind that, a man held up a huge picture of the teen before his death. At the top of the hill, in the home of the boy’s mother, women wailed. The noise was hard to bear. Not the stifled cries you hear at an American funeral, but the gut-wrenching wails and screams from deep within. I will never forget their wailing. I can still hear it in my head, and after having two of my own children, the pain and understanding has only intensified. I stood there, unable to move, sobbing.

After a while the procession began again back to the Mosque. We had to be careful of our place because my husband and I needed to stay together, but we were separated by gender. We stood in between the men and women, right next to the boy's grandfather and his mother, an oddly intimate location within a family we didn’t even know. When the women began to weep again by the grave, my husband started too. He held his face in his hands and tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t. I felt choked, but wouldn't let myself cry again. I might not stop.

Men read the Qur’an, separated again by gender. The men inside the graveyard, the women outside the stones. All but two women were scarved. My husband got mad at them. No respect, he said.

When it was over, we drove back to our village. My head was exploding with thoughts. The blown-out house next-door to my in-laws home, where they used to live. All the pictures and memories that had been lost. The bullet hole scar in my husband’s arm from the day Israeli soldiers opened fire on his school. The family of his best friend they killed that day, who had lost their son at only 8-years-old. The father who sat there sobbing when he saw my husband, now a grown man. The difficulty to forgive people in my own life, who had done so little to me in comparison. And the enormity of even beginning to heal any of this and move forward into a peaceful and prosperous new beginning.