Each time a news bulletin came on the air regarding a new terrorist bombing in Israel, we would remain glued to the TV, always hoping against hope that our 37-year-old son Steve and his family were safe and not involved. We would watch the news as an ongoing ritual, searching pictures of one disaster after another and hoping for our loved ones not to be there.
A perpetual state of ‘butterflies’ exists within us for this vital, handsome, brave offspring who has lived in Israel since he was a teenager. Although the life is difficult, he has managed to live there happily despite the many hardships that he and his countrymen have experienced.
We arrived home before midnight on May 17 from a wonderful evening at an awards dinner where my husband David had received a lifetime award for service from his colleagues at the hospital where he works as a surgeon. As usual we put on Fox News in order to update what was happening in the world and especially Israel.
There it was! Another bus bombing in Jerusalem. The number 6 bus was blown up by a terrorist, dressed as an Orthodox Jew and wearing a bomb belt detonated to kill himself and take with him as many innocent victims as he could.
I searched the rescue scene again, hoping that I would not recognize anyone I knew. A wave of nausea passed over me as I thought I caught a glimpse of Steve’s arm on a stretcher. Just a mother’s fear I thought; couldn’t be. But another sleepless night lay ahead. Every hour awake wondering if this time I was not imagining this horrible scenario.
The phone call came at 6 a.m. Steve’s wife Julie was on the phone, speaking very calmly and slowly. “There has been a bombing on the bus that Steve was on. He is alive but hurt. Here is Barbara the social worker who will explain.”
Both my husband and I are wide awake now, stunned, anxious, and in tears. Barbara Hanoch begins to speak. “Steve received an injury to his spinal cord, his cervical cord between C3-4. He is stable, and has had surgery to remove the ball bearing that entered his neck.”
As medical people, we know that that level of entry is a critically devastating injury.
“He is conscious but on a ventilator,” she continues. “We have arranged for you to stay in the milonite (motel-like room) at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem. Someone from the Petuach Leumi will contact you.”
Barbara relayed all the necessary information professionally with compassion. We were to make arrangements to fly to Israel as soon as possible.
Thus began our new life – a life that will be forever changed. The terrible injury has affected not only Steve, but also his family and his friends. His four sons will most likely not be able to sit on their dad’s shoulders, or play Frisbee and run the baseball bases with him, ever again.
Culture of Hate and Destruction
We arrive at 10 a.m. the next day, and as I sit by his bedside in Hadassah’s intensive care unit watching his body fight to obtain the oxygen so vital for life, my mind and thoughts travel in many directions.
I cannot understand the mentality of a culture where Palestinian parents raise a child to want to die in such a fashion; bombs strapped to his waist with shrapnel of all imaginative kinds (in order to inflict the most deadly damage to the innocent). He was a 19-year-old engineering student whose parents, although mourning his loss, are ‘proud of what their son has done.’ How much good might this young man have done for his people in a long lifetime.
