My Beloved Nephew
Kristofor Tif Stonesifer was born August 20, 1973, a year before my son Rick Dietrich was born August 5, 1874. When Rick was born, Tif (as we called him then, much to his later embarrassment) and his mother Ruth came to help the new mother and enjoy the baby. The two boys were more like brothers than cousins, like Kris’s older brother Ric, and we all have been especially close. There have been countless vacations and holidays spent together and we plan to continue them, though now there are fewer of us. The three boys were engaging and unholy terrors, and we were lucky to have a swimming pool at our home in Tampa where they could work off their energy and indulge in competitive but well-supervised games.
One year, for reasons not quite clear to me, I volunteered to take the boys to Washington DC, for some fun and culture, and to visit with my dear friend Beth who agreed we could stay in her apartment. Now, you may not have realized this, but there is nothing fun to do in Washington, not for pre-teen boys with a mom and aunt who is an art historian. The Air and Space Museum was a disaster. Kris pronounced that there were no video games in it and nothing to do. The National Gallery of Art was worse, except the corridors were great for running in. Beth’s apartment building held one attraction—the elevator—which could be summoned and sent on at will, with no one in it and confounding the building’s occupants. Finally we hit pay dirt—the zoo. But the only thing of interest there was the gorilla. He would eat and regurgitate his food, sending my threesome into gales of laughter. Little boys can be really gross.
In June of 1993, again for unclear reasons, I took Kris and Rick on an extended trip to the Czech Republic and Vienna. We rented a car and I drove, because they were both too young for international driving. They navigated while I developed high blood pressure. One focus of our trip was Kafka in Prague and another Klimt in Vienna for Kris. He had completed a year of college by then, a Philosophy major, and was mightily involved in existential questions and the meaning of life, stemming from his own search and from the germinal book I had given him, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. The book examines differing approaches to the meaning of life, starting with writers and artists in despair and moving to the Nietzschean affirmation which insists that we "affirm in spite of."
Kris was moody and introspective. He was twenty, a philosophy major, too smart to buy into conventional morality or wisdom, too sensitive to plague others about it, and too young to do anything much about the world and its unhappy citizens. He wrote in his journal alone at night. He had written in a term paper called "A Politically Incorrect Inquiry into Religion and Existence" that the central question was "is there anything worth doing?" He rejected the usual
solutions—job, money, things. He interrogated organized religions and concluded with George Bernard Shaw that "activity is the only road to knowledge," citing Man and Superman correctly.
He admired the Australian Aborigine’s refusal to be chained to material objects (from a reading of Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message) and Native Americans being able to achieve a wider consciousness than Heidegger’s "triviality of every-dayness." He comments on the yogic disciplines in Hinduism and concludes that "with the use of this inward contemplation one discovers an identity within one’s self. One can learn to experience God without having to believe in him first."
In a letter to me after I had read and commented on his paper, he wrote, "I disagree with you in saying that one’s death has little to do with how one should live. What I mean is that if you had a fortnight to live would you be doing what you are doing? In your case, teaching. If the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t be teaching anyway. If it is worth doing with only two weeks to live then it’s probably worth doing the rest of your life. One needs to find something worth doing in the face of death, which is not easily done."
Highlights of our trip were our walking tours of Prague, led by my great artist friend Vladimir Dolezal, who showed us the places where the Czech people engineered their freedom in the 1989 "velvet revolution." We bought all of Havel’s books and read them together. Kris went to Kafka’s cemetery on his own. At night the two boys rode the trams and pretended to hang out on the main square, watching girls in black spandex in the age-old ritual of looking and waiting. In Brno, we visited Mendel’s gardens and museum and were all thrilled to discover the double helix sign of life at the entrance.
Kris left school and worked to support himself in the nursery—landscaping business, learning to prune trees to prolong their life—he has pruned a removed many in my yard in Ohio. His good friend Rob had died in mysterious and possibly suicidal circumstances and Kris was devastated. A hope came to him in Rob’s sister Erin—they fell in love and have been together since. Together once in my house in Ohio while I was on sabbatical in Egypt, studying the antiquities and learning to love Islamic and contemporary Egyptian art and the Egyptian people. The kids still remember that great Thanksgiving at my house (while I was gone) when they enjoyed a Vegan repast, and Kris and Erin’s cat Yaksha tormented my Eliot and Lady Maigrey.
Later, Kris came again and built a debris hut in my woods and slept in it on winter nights—a pile of branches and leaves artfully constructed to retain heat. It remains still, like the others he has built in Pennsylvania and Montana. He had taken a number of course at the Tom Brown Tracker School in New Jersey, and was keen on wilderness training, caring for the earth, dwelling in the harmony of nature. He had passed the test where he stalked a deer, creeping up on it invisibly till he could stroke it and withdraw.
He resumed his studies in Philosophy at the University of Montana in Missoula where his best friend Luke was studying and joined the ROTC as a way of preparing for the future. I think he would have joined the Apache Nation if he could have. But he was too old to be on a full Army scholarship and so he enlisted. He excelled in basic training and was chosen to carry the guidon at the graduation ceremony. He went to Airborne School and the Rangers, another family who keep his memory alive. Kris fell back in September, spraining an ankle in a night navigation exercise, and had his cast off October 5. I was relieved since I thought that would keep him out of danger. I called him September 11 and told his machine "Don’t go, Kris. Please don’t go." But he was deployed soon after he got the cast off and died in the helicopter accident October 19 in Pakistan on a rescue mission. We got the news Saturday morning, October 20, and two days later the letter telling that Kris had been deployed. Hard.
All week we waited for Kris’s body to be brought back. And all week we were assisted by Casualty Assistance Officers and Publicity people. We had hundreds of media requests and thank them for their condolences , but were not yet ready to talk. We had a thousand calls, emails, and letters from friends and family elsewhere and many from the families of the September 11 victims thanking Kris for his sacrifice. Sergeant Major Henton, Sergeant First Class Pacheco and Chaplain Kirby were enormously helpful and kind—all the Rangers were wonderful.
On Thursday, October 25, we left our homes in a cavalcade for the Philadelphia airport to see Kris come home. He was flown in on a commercial airplane and security was very tight, the airport personnel cautious and respectful. When it was time, we marched out onto the runway so that the Rangers could bring Kris’s body in its flag-draped casket over to his family. The women were advised not to create a scene or hug someone in uniform—this was a military event and videotaped for the Rangers back in Pakistan in Kris’s unit. We watched as the Rangers carried the coffin to the hearse and saluted the flag as it went by. There were no dry eyes. We maintained composure but took Kris into our hearts as never before. We had a police escort out of the airport.
The next day, Friday, October 26, at 3pm, we held the funeral at the Shelly Funeral Home in Plumsteadville, PA. Again, the Rangers saluted their fallen comrade, gave him the 21-gun salute, played taps, and presented Kris’s parents with medals for his bravery.
About ten people spoke in testimonial to Kris’s life and accomplishments. As per his written instructions, his body was cremated and the ashes will be scattered in Montana by both his families—ours and his and now our Ranger family when they return from the war. They must return. We have already lost too many in this war and must find another solution.
Kris was charismatic and strong, physically agile and walked as if life were a dance. He had a canny sense of humor and delighted in teasing, playing chess, intellectual conversations, and a good piece of tofu. He was a young man of many enthusiasms—writing short stories, Ninjas, American post modern pragmatism, nature and wilderness survival, Russian mysticism, making gifts from willow twigs, capable of great affection and great conversation. He was beautiful to look at, clear skin and clear eyes, often with a mischievous twinkle . He was my beloved nephew and I shall not lose his brightness.
You may have wondered why many in our family are named Ric or Rick (except Kris). That is because my brother’s and my father was Frederic A. Stonesifer, known to the grandchildren as Great Fred, because he was great. As was our mother, Elsie Sandberg Stonesifer, a Swedish American, called MorMor or FarMor, depending. They gave my brother Ric and me the love that does not die, although they both died in 1999, each 89 years old, two months apart.
To all my family—best brother Ric and dear friend Ruth, beloved nephew Ric, his wife Dana, and their children Dereck, Camrin, and new grand nephew Kristofor Scott, born October 14, 2001 and named to honor his Uncle Kris, something that delighted him immensely, to Rick (best son of mine—and only)—my love for all of you sings in my heart and I would give anything to ease this pain. The Sufi poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi, born in Balkh, Afghanistan in 1207, says "the way you make love is the way God will be with you." He was speaking about more than sex. We must make more love with Kris’s grin and serious intent to protect each other and our children all over the world. We cannot make up for this loss but we can work to make things better.
Kris’s death, in this bewildering and awful time, has changed me in some definitive ways or strengthened my resolve. I will dedicate my life and work to finding alternatives to military action as the first or primary response to conflict. People must help each other more. I will dedicate my life and work to creating greater harmonies between people(s), and especially to dispelling misconceptions about Islam, Muslim people, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and others.
We have, as a country, a real obligation to redress some wrongs and establish greater well-being all over the world. I affirm my love for my family (mine and yours), and dedicate my life and work to enhancing the bonds we share.
The world has stopped for me and my family in a certain sense. We no longer have Kris and are that much diminished. Yet, we have Kris’s gift and what will now be his legacy: to live fully, to question, and to persevere. There is no doubt in my mind that he was one of the most talented and special people on earth ever—and certainly there is no doubt how much we love him. But if his death and life have any meaning at all, it is to dance and laugh and banish terror. I have the vegetarian cookbook he gave me last Christmas—"Eat well, Aunt Linn. Keep your tail up!"
Aunt Linn
November 6, 2001
Dr. Linnea Stonesifer Dietrich is a Professor of Art History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and before 1989, she taught at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She is 57, a specialist on Gauguin and the Post Impressionists and a member of the Islamic and Middle East Studies Program, and an Affiliate of Women’s Studies. She has most recently published an article on "Huda Lutfi—A Contemporary Egyptian Artist " in the Woman’s Art Journal.