At the fiery end of an Australian summer marred with fear, anxiety, and terrible human and property loss came the happening too dreadful to conceive of.
Children in deep Australian suburbia walking for ice cream on a sweltering Saturday evening. A car plows into them, killing four and injuring three others, one seriously. The dead are the Abdallah siblings – Sienna, 8, Angelina, 12, and Antony, 13 – and their cousin Veronique Sakr, 11.
People, regardless of whether they’re parents, could not imagine having one child killed. Let alone three. Only those who have endured such loss can truly know it.
Sometimes a random event, usually one of such human catastrophe, makes us stop and examine ourselves. The deaths of these children is one such moment of national pause. But that is not simply because it forced so many of us to ask ourselves the unanswerable: how would I feel?
No. It’s what happened next, I believe, that moved so many Australians – and anyone anywhere who caught any of the parents’ public grief – to examine who they are personally.
The next morning as a shrine of soft toys and flowers grew around the place in the Sydney suburb of Oatlands where the accident happened – and as people from across the city, including many strangers, came to express their pain – the father of the Abdallah siblings, Danny, spoke.
It was impossible to believe he could speak at all, let alone with such dignity, so soon. Surely his words would magnify our dismay – the anger and injustice and outrage – we felt on his behalf.
Yet only love and profound beauty imbued his words.
“My name is Daniel Abdallah. I have a wife, Leila, and six beautiful children I’ve been blessed with. Yesterday, I lost three of my children. I’m numb. All I just want to say is please, drivers, be careful. These kids were just walking innocently, enjoying each others’ company and this morning I woke up, I’ve lost three kids”, he said.
“Antony is 13, very handsome boy. He loved basketball. He woke up that morning and said, ‘We’re going to play this game for Kobe [Bryant]. Angelina, she was my MLH – my little helper. Anything I needed, she had my back. Sienna, she was my little diva, my little actress. They’ve gone to a better place.”
Later Veronique Sakr’s family members made a statement of love and appreciation for the girl they had lost while thanking the emergency services, first responders and all who attended the tragic scene. It ended with “God Bless you Veronique.”
The Oatlands shrine to the dead children grew with the offerings of grief while so many of us wondered how the family would cope. Where could the next breaths come from amid such pain?
Again, we had to ponder soul-searing, existential questions that go to the essence of humanity. How would I react? What might impel me to continue as they have? To hate or forgive? No, it could never be forgiveness, surely, given the profundity of this hideous, senseless carnage?
A day later Leila Geagea, the mother of the three dead Abdallah siblings, said, “I think in my heart I forgive him [the alleged driver]. But I want the court to be fair. I’m not going to hate him because that’s not who we are. It feels very unreal. I feel like I’m still waiting for them to come home.”
Much has been made of the strong Christian faith of the family. But many who also have religious faith would find themselves unable to draw such generosity of spirit, such human warmth and understanding, from their beliefs or from anywhere else in their hearts. Those, like me, who’ve lost faith, may not have known such forgiveness (indeed, perhaps more the opposite) to exist within their religious communities, though they may have heard it preached often enough.
So many of us have hated, held deep enmities, for comparable trivialities.
Wherever that love and that forgiveness came from, millions of people – most who can’t possibly empathise with the families of these dead children – are pondering the beautiful, provocative mystery of it all.
Listening to them, we can only wonder what is inside each of us.
At a time when so many have lost so much faith in the world, these parents remind us of the strength and generosity of the human heart.
If they can forgive, we can too.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
