Lynn C. Woolsey: “Dolores Kesterson wanted to know if I had read about the father in Florida. Dolores's 29-year-old son, Erik, her only…”

“Dolores Kesterson wanted to know if I had read about the father in Florida. Dolores's 29-year-old son, Erik, her only child, was killed almost 10 months ago when his Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Mosul during a firefight. He had been in Iraq just 8 days. She found out the ways parents always find out, a knock on their door. For her, it came around 8:25 the night of November 15 as she was washing her dinner dishes. A man and a woman from the Army stood in the doorway. They gently suggested she sit down. 'This father in Florida,' she was telling me, 'when the Marines came to the door to tell him his son had died, took a hammer to their van, poured gasoline into it, set it on fire and got in.' Her face remained expressionless, but her eyes lifted to meet mine as if to say, do you get it? That is what it feels like. Later, during the show, I saw a picture of Eric: good-looking, square-jawed, and smiling. But what I really saw on the screen was my own son, my own only child. That is why we do not look too closely, I think, on those occasions when the names and photos of the dead appear in print. We do not want to get too close to that pain.”