Grief Knows No Native Tongue — But We Must Listen, Wherever It Speaks

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Finally, today, I was thinking about a friend of mine - a teacher, a neighbor who passed away earlier this week. Out of respect for her family's privacy, I won't call her name. But believe me when I say she will be missed by her family, of course, but also by me and other neighbors, by my children and the many, many other children and adults she taught over the years.

There was so much to cherish - her generous spirit, her quiet, consistent encouragement, her appreciation of all the different personalities who came into her life. Of course, I mourn her because I know her and appreciate her, but I also mourn her because the grieving of one merges into the grieving of others. Can I just tell you - I think both kinds of grief are important.

On Friday, the same day that Paris suffered the attacks, a bomb exploded during midday prayers at a mosque in Yemen, according to Reuters, killing several worshipers and injuring others. Also on Friday, ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide attack at a funeral in Baghdad that killed at least 18 people and wounded more than 40. The funeral was for a Muslim man who'd been part of a militia trying to get ISIS out of the country's north and west.

There's more. On Thursday, ISIS also took responsibility for a double attack in southern Beirut that killed more than 40 people and wounded more than 200 others. The group said in a statement on Twitter posted by its supporters that their members blew up a bicycle loaded with explosives on a busy street. And when people rushed to help, a second suicide bomber's explosives went off, killing and wounding yet more people. Eyewitnesses say there would have been even greater carnage if a Beirut man, out on a stroll with his little girl, had not tackled the second suicide bomber, pushing the attacker away and taking much of the impact of the second bomb onto himself.

And on Wednesday, nine people were killed in a terrorist attack in Egypt's North Sinai. According to news reports, a group opened fire at a family home and then blew up a car bomb near it. Most of the victims were members of a single family, including two children under three years old. There's more I could add to this terrible list - an alleged attack on a village in northern Niger by the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram on Wednesday, the murder of three Turkish police officers in a bomb attack on Tuesday - but you get the point.

Paris calls out to us because many of us have been there or wish to go. For many of us, it is the city of our dreams. The truth is there is terrible violence being perpetrated all over the world in places many of us will never visit by some of the same people and the same ideology that led to the massacres in Paris. These lives matter. They matter because when we draw the line between those near and far and those who look like us and those who don't, those whose names we can easily pronounce and those which we cannot, we participate in the same kind of dehumanizing that allows people to do such awful things in the first place.

Getting back to my neighbor - I'm not sharing her name, but later, I'm going to drop off a card and some food and my best wishes for her family. And when I do, I will try to think of another name - the name of the man who's credited with saving unknown numbers of lives in Beirut last week by tackling a suicide bomber. His name is Adel Termos. I will try to remember it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.