What the bereaved Milgrim family faces now without Sarah

Even the skies wept at Sarah Milgrim's funeral this week.

Family members, friends, civic officials and others filled the sanctuary of Congregation Beth Torah in Overland Park on a rainy day to say farewell to -- and celebrate the brief but sparkling life of -- the 26-year-old KC-metro native who, along with her soon-to-be fiancé, Yaron Lischinsky, was gunned down May 21 in Washington, D.C., outside the Capital Jewish Museum after they had attended a reception hosted by the American Jewish Committee.

The murders were a heinous crime against humanity. Court papers about the alleged shooter quote him as saying "I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza." And, as I've said before, he thus did even more damage to the Palestinians and to those who still remain in bloodied Gaza as a result of the Hamas-Israeli war.

Three rabbis and two cantors/liturgists led Sarah's service and did marvelous work -- work that never should have been necessary. Misguided hate once again has slammed into a beautiful family, the members of which now will lament this loss for the rest of their lives.

The mournful reality is that none of this is new, none of it unique to human history.

The achingly painful, often ignored, God-questioning book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Scriptures captures well what the Milgrim and Lischinsky families can expect in the days and decades ahead. Hear in this book of sharp, relentless theodicy the pain found through scholar Robert Alter's translation of Lamentations 2:11:

"My eyes were worn out with tears,

my innards were roiled.

My bile spilled out on the ground

for the breaking of my People's Daughter. . ."

and, in 4:2, this:

Zion's precious children,

worth their weight in gold,

how are they reckoned as earthenware jars,

the work of the potter's hands!

Yes, friends, family, clergy and others will surround the Milgrim family with love, with help, with their own grief. But the family will never know a day without sharp pains of grief because a radicalized fool thought the deaths of Sarah and Yaron would help the beleaguered Palestinians.

In much the same way, my sister, her husband, their remaining two children, their late son's widow and many of the rest of us in that family know the truth of all this pain because terrorists -- driven by wretched, calamitous theology that had been twisted out of the hands of traditional Islam -- murdered my nephew on Sept. 11, 2001.

Have all of our lives moved on? Of course. There was no other rational choice. But every day we lament. Every day we remember. Every day we give thanks for the time we had with Karleton just as the Milgrims now will give thanks for each day of life that was gifted to Sarah.

As they do that, they surely will be comforted by the words that Rabbi Doug Alpert spoke in his remarkable eulogy (you can watch the whole funeral at the second link in the first paragraph above) about what he called Sarah's "innate sense of goodness" and her identity as a "pursuer of peace."

But the Milgrims know now, at least intellectually, that such comforting truths won't return Sarah to life. She is gone forever and they will mourn until their own deaths, even as they will always remember watching pall bearers move her casket out of the sanctuary after the service (pictured here). Which is why all of us now must pick up Sarah's work for peace, whether here in the U.S. or in the remarkably shredded and traumatized Middle East. The Hamas-Israel war is not worth one more destroyed life.

Sarah and Yaron knew that. And we should know that, too. Maybe our collective failure to bring anything like peace to the planet was one more reason that even the skies wept at Sarah Milgrim's funeral.

(This post also can be found today here on The Kansas City Star's editorial pages.)