To a Life Short-Lived

In the headlines today is Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs and president of the Serbian Republic in the early 1990s. He was captured in Belgrade yesterday, having spent 12 years in semi-hiding under a false identity, and is expected to face trial in The Hague. Karadzic was once heard saying the war against the Bosnian Muslims was not "ethnic cleansing" but "an opportunity for them to go live with other Muslims, away from the Serbs."

What's missing from the news, of course, is stories of war-torn families whose lives were forever altered during the war in Bosnia. Whether Muslims or Christians, many have lost their brothers, sisters, fathers, homes, land and other possessions, and still overcame unfathomable obstacles while creating new lives for themselves.

A friend, Katerina Brdjanovic was one such young woman. I met her through a friend while I was at Mount Holyoke and immediately came to think of her as a sister. She was young, beautiful, very smart, very kind, extremely good with children, selfless and truly appreciative of the new opportunities she was being given in her new life. She had lost her brother to the war in Bosnia and her father to diabetes when she arrived in the U.S. to finish high school at the Presentation of Mary Academy in Methuen, Massachusetts. I met her in 1997, her first year in the States, and even drove up from New York to attend her graduation party one night, only to drive back the next morning, not an easy task for me considering how I drive. Such was the love and generosity she inspired in others. She continued her education at Saint Anselm College, with a scholarship of course, and spent her summers working at orphanages in Romania and serving as a translator for Nobody's Children, a non-profit organization responsible for her new and wonderful life in the U.S.

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of Katerina's death from a freaky car accident in Croatia at the age of 20. After she died, her host mother gave Katerina's precious teddy bear to me. I don't know why, as I'm pretty sure she wasn't aware of my carefully hidden teddy bear collection or my secret obsession for second-hand toys. She said she wanted to give me something to remember her by. I packed the bear in a closet and moved it three times over the years until it was time to start packing for Turkey. Even with a daughter who's truly obssessed with stuffed animals, I could never bring myself to hold or even look at Katerina's teddy so it stayed in the dark for almost eight years. It just made me too sad to think of the life that was not even a quarter-lived and had such promise.

So the bear found a new home in a Baptist Church Sunday school in Brooklyn shortly before the seventy-four boxes got packed and shipped to Turkey. I thought I would keep it a secret forever, that I couldn't bare to keep it any longer and had to give it away.

Yet here we are, confession #who cares, I'm admitting the atrocities committed against Katerina's teddy bear. (As you can see, I never needed it to keep remembering that amazing young woman.) I hope Radovan Karadzic finds making confessions as purifying as I do so that he's convicted of his crimes and spends the rest of his life in prison.