7/9/98

The Diana Who Lived

    "Smile!" Diana Campuzano, visiting Jerusalem a year ago, froze for the camera. She would not smile again, for a long, long time.
    A few minutes after that photo was taken, Diana's life blew up in her face. A suicide terrorist struck barely three meters from where she was sitting, at a cafe on Ben Yehuda Street.
    Another attack, another statistic: the toll. The dead.
    Perhaps it is too much grievous impact for us to dwell on the injured too. With four dead, or eight, or 20, we mourn that many, and give a passing thought to the wounded: at least they'll live.
    Yes. But what of the living?
    "There were days I wanted to kill myself, days I hated God. For 51 weeks and three days, I have mourned who I was."
    Diana didn't die on September 4, 1997. But she's had a tormented life since. "My head was cracked open, a hole the size of a golfball. I have a fake forehead. You know, the doctors had to use tweezers to remove skull parts from my brain. I lost an eardrum. I can't hear too well. My eye was damaged. I can't taste or smell. This is not my nose. I had second-degree burns on my arms and legs.
    "I hate the way I look." Diana's eyes flash. "Those bastards."
    She doesn't hate Arabs, just fanatics. "I have to go through this because they're promised a hundred wives in heaven for killing Jews."
    And there's the irony. Diana, 33, from Rochester, New York, came here as part of her desire to become a Jew. Her parents, devout Christians originally from Colombia, did not even know their daughter was in Israel, did not know she was converting to Judaism. When her Dad, Ramiro, got the call, he could comprehend none of it.
    “The operator told me there was a collect call from Ezra in Jerusalem,” he says. “I responded that I did not know any Ezra and that she must have the wrong number. Two minutes later the phone rang again and the operator repeated the same story. I gave her the same answer, but then I heard a voice in the background saying, ‘Tell him it’s about his daughter Diana.’
    “I accepted the call and Ezra told me Diana had just left surgery but that she was okay. I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ I did not know there was an explosion in Jerusalem. I told Ezra that Diana was in New York City.”
    Suddenly, he found himself in Israel, nursing his horribly devastated daughter, because Arabs were killing Jews which, to his shock, now involved his family.
    Part of the shock was cultural. Whatever his experience with Jews in America, it did not prepare him for Israel's roiling, rough-edged ingathering.
    She hated God early in her tribulation, demanding to know why she had been chosen to suffer. Then she came to accept whatever plan He had in mind. "There was a reason for me to be there," she says, espousing fatalism over fanaticism. "I thank God for being with me, for keeping me alive." Then she adds: "Well, sometimes I don't."
And that's the thing about being a secondary statistic: the merely wounded can get emotional, can hate God then thank Him, can be both heroic and weak.
    Diana didn't think or feel anything for the first three weeks. But it's been an emotional rollercoaster ever since.
    She had her epiphany nine months later. "God," she beseeched, "Please, be with me, guide me, give me the strength." It happened. She may not be perfectly at peace with her fate, but since then she has had more good days than bad. And she sees things differently.
    "My outlook has changed. My life in the last year was complete hell. Complete hell. But God has given me a gift, a better appreciation for life, even the small things." Like, not what she lost that terrible day a year ago, rather, what she didn't lose. After all, she was "merely" wounded.
    Is it a triumph to suffer a lifetime, over the dead denied that choice? No one has the right to answer but those who’ve suffred, unimaginably, as Diana has.
Over the past year the answer has been yes, sometimes, maybe, no. Sometimes it depends on where she seeks the answer: in that mirror, mirror on the wall, or in the final photograph of her last 20 minutes as Diana Campuzano.

NOTE: The headline refers both to the fate of Diana Campuzano, and of Britain’s Princess Diana, who died that same week.