PDA

View Full Version : Woman who lost her only son in Iraq war gives tearful speech



thedrifter
05-14-07, 07:41 AM
SAN FRANCISCO
Church puts focus on peace for Mother's Day
Woman who lost her only son in Iraq war gives tearful speech

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, May 14, 2007

May is the hardest time of year for Karen Meredith.

It's the month when her son first shipped off to Iraq, in 2003, and it's the month when he was killed there in 2004.

It's also the month of Mother's Day, when she is reminded of everything she lost with the death of her only son, Army Lt. Kenneth Ballard.

"There's no one left to call me 'Mom,' " Meredith told a teary-eyed congregation at First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco on Sunday. "He left the day after Mother's Day, and he said he'd make it up to me when he returned. Today is my third Mother's Day that I will not pick up the phone and hear his voice."

The church this year recalled the spirit of the earliest Mother's Day in 1872, created by a Civil War mother, Julia Ward Howe, as a time to celebrate peace. Who better to promote peace, asked Howe, than the mothers and wives of soldiers?

She wrote: "Arise, all women who have hearts, and say firmly: Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

Mother's Day did not become a national holiday until 1914, and by then it had become associated more with flowers and greeting cards than peace rallies.

Pablo Paredes, a former Navy ensign who joined Meredith in speaking on Sunday, said he came close to forgetting what his mother had taught him when he was sent to Iraq. The Oakland resident said he was troubled by the deadly tasks he was assigned in the war and felt his work was a betrayal to his mother's lessons.

"My mother was a very moral person. She instilled in me a sense of brotherhood," said Paredes, who ended up serving three months of hard labor when he refused to return to Iraq. "War is the antithesis of motherhood."

For Sean O'Neill, it was the mother of a fellow Marine who convinced him that the war was doing more harm than good.

O'Neill had just returned from a tour in Iraq and was at a service for several Marines who died overseas. At the end, one of the mothers came to him and grabbed his shoulders and wept, asking about her son and how he had died. O'Neill had been one of the last people to see him alive.

"That really got through my hardened heart," said O'Neill, a sergeant who is on inactive ready reserve and lives in Berkeley. "That's when I started asking myself, 'Why are we fighting?' It was really thinking about my own mother that changed things for me."

E-mail Erin Allday at eallday@sfchronicle.com.

Ellie