Posted on 08/29/2005 10:02:41 PM PDT by max_rpf
The war in Iraq is racing ahead of Jan Lang's good intentions.
In 2003, around the time President Bush declared major combat operations to be over, Mrs. Lang and a group of military mothers pledged to provide a handmade, personalized quilt for the next of kin of every U.S. serviceman and woman killed in Iraq. It seemed like a manageable task when the death toll stood around 250.
--Snip--
But she vows to keep quilting, inspired by those moments when a quilt reaches its intended recipient just when it's needed the most. Betsy Beard of Chapel Hill, N.C., got hers last month, on the day her son's unit returned to the U.S. without him. She was at home, reading aloud the list of names of the returning men in the vain hope that there had been some mistake and her son Brad would appear on it. The doorbell rang, and the FedEx man handed her a box with a quilt inside, inscribed in memory of her son. She spread it out on the floor, crawled over each square, and wrapped herself in it until she stopped weeping.
That day she wrote to Mrs. Lang: "This week has been one of the most painful of the whole nine months of our bereavement. Writing 'nine months' like that makes me think of the nine months I carried my son before he was born. Some days I thought it would never end, but of course it did, and he was born: a perfect, lovely, healthy baby boy. Now I have been carrying my grief for nine months, and there is no end in sight, no wonderful outcome to all this grindingly sorrowful labor....When the pain is so intense, so deep, and so unremitting, it is a comfort to know that other families care."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
ping for later
I don't think I can...
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