The world is awash in ginger today

Dear Yarden,

You don’t know us, but we know you.

And yet, we can’t begin to understand what you have been through.

What you are going through now.

Today, we watched you bury your wife, Shiri, and your sons, Ariel and Kfir. We choked back tears as we listened to you eulogize your family, finally reunited for a moment before their bodies were laid to their final resting place.

Yarden, they are home. Home, on Israeli soil.

Watching you with your orange kipah, framed by orange flowers, followed to the funeral by thousands of orange balloons, orange signs, people in orange clothing — the world is awash in ginger today.

Since the day you were all taken, we waited for all four of you. Prayed for you. Dreamed of you. Had nightmares of what was happening to you all.

We learned they were torturing you, and we knew nothing for so long about the fate of your family.

We can’t understand what you have experienced, the pain, the suffering. How could anyone ever know what you have been through?

But know that you all were always in our thoughts.

We saw red-headed children everywhere, and a breath would catch in our lungs, and a pit would grow in our stomachs, and we would mutter a silent prayer to bring them home to us.

The children of this country waited, and demanded for news of you every morning since we learned you were all taken.

Yarden, this ending is nothing like what we prayed for.

The stories we now know, we can’t comprehend.

Some days there are many words, but today — there are so few.

There are no words we can say to comfort you in your grief.

There are hardly any thoughts we can muster to make sense of it all.

The only thing that we have clarity around is how much you are loved.

How much your people love your family.

How much we love you.

As this horrible hostage chapter closes, and another painful one of mourning begins, I hope you find hands to hold on to.

I hope you are held by God in the darkest moments of your grief.

Know that you are precious, and there are millions of people in this country who thank God that you are back home.

I know nothing can replace Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir.

They were here for such a short time and yet they changed the world.

They changed all of us.

They taught us about innocence and right from wrong.

They were the front line in the fight against evil.

I hope you feel their love when the sun sets and the sky turns ochre and burnt sienna, the tips of the clouds are ginger-toned — as if red-headed angels are resting and watching from up above.

I know millions of people in Israel and around the world will see them in every sunset,

every flash of red hair,

every Batman signal

for the rest of our days.

We love you, Yarden.