aftershock

so, the bbc’s gaza correspondent, alan johnston, has been released after four months of captivity…..
i woke up to the news on my radio alarm this morning. the news ‘empowered’ my husband to leap out of bed, as he imagined the giddy joyousness of liberation following a long and tortuous incarceration. i'm not good at waking up, but if i were, i’m sure i’d have done the same. my progress was slower and i am usually provoked into getting out of bed when my siamese cat (who has no ‘pants’ on), tries sitting on my face…. however, i did feel like a small weight had been lifted – not that i’d been worrying about alan – i don’t know him! yet, through the news coverage of his disappearance, we’d all been invited to share in the suffering his family endured.
through bleary-eyed yet stoical interviews with alan’s elderly father, the media plays on our natural and intrinsic urge to empathise, and stirs up our own deepest fears of unimaginable loss. lost in thought in the office (the flat screen monitor defocusses), you feel you know enough to become alan’s mother: thinking how, in the past, you’d always secretly hoped he would give up his perilous journalistic career in the middle east, where too many people are so filled with anger and fear and murderous intent…. in a way you’d almost hoped that something would happen to him – something that might injure him enough to bring him home and prevent him from returning. at least that way he’d stay alive, with no choice but to accept his fate and reluctantly nestle in the bosom of his loving family. "back home with us… but the kidnapping… four months of abject horror for me. four months of waking up each day (if i slept the night before, that is) with that aching hollowness in the pit of my abdomen, ignorant as to whether or not my son had been executed in the night. i apprehensively turned on the tv every morning, dreading the almost inevitable news that his beheading had been broadcast on the internet overnight.
as the coverage of his abduction faded, so did my hope. you know, in an effort to tell myself that life goes on, i went shopping with my friend, maggie. i tried to relax and have a giggle, even. we went back home at 11.30am. i was weeping. margaret gave me a tea and a slice of battenburg. how long would our lives have to be on hold for? is he suffering more than i am now?
on the news of his release, i am overwhelmed with joy: i cannot stand. i’ve never known such a feeling. but my jubilation is tainted with a glowering anger…. how could he have been so stupid; so selfish? everyone warned him of the dangers of working in gaza – his greatest fear was being killed or kidnapped by radicals! yet he went in, christ-like, to bring the stories of their peoples’ suffering to an apathetic british public! didn’t he think about the suffering we might go through? he’s our son. we raised him. i can’t face losing him. not again….
i know he’s heart broken about how his kidnapping has effected us, and i know he has suffered too – doubly so, as not only is he completely wracked with guilt for the turmoil this has created in our family, but he has also had to endure the nightmare of not knowing whether he might live or die from one minute to the next. and this is why, in the end, he will never know about my ambivalence…the most important thing is that he is home."