Rachel Corrie's mother: 'I know this won't be the end' | World news | The Guardian

[KoKo]

Cindy and Craig Corrie in 2008 with their surviving daughter Sarah, going through papers left by Rachel. Photograph: Stuart Isett/Polaris

The news that would turn Cindy Corrie's life inside out came around noon on a Sunday in March 2003. She was at home, then in Charlotte, North Carolina, when the phone rang.

"The apartment was kind of a mess, there were papers all over the place, and Craig [her husband] was doing the laundry," she recalls in a soft, hesitant voice. On the line was her son-in-law Kelly Simpson, but Cindy could hear her elder daughter Sarah "crying, just hysterical" in the background. They had bad news, Kelly said.

"At that point Sarah got on the phone and said: 'It's Rachel.' The first words that came out of my mouth were: 'Is she dead?' I guess I just had to articulate the worst possibility. And Sarah said: 'We think so.'"

Sarah and Kelly had picked up a phone message from a neighbour in the family's home town of Olympia, Washington State, conveying sympathy after hearing about "the tragedy" on television. They turned on their TV set to find, scrolling across the bottom of the screen, the words: "Olympia activist killed in Gaza Strip."

"Sarah thought: if it's Rachel, why haven't Mum and Dad called me? Then she thought: they don't know." Still holding the phone, Cindy walked across a car park to where her husband was, in the apartment block's laundry room. "You can't soften something like that. I said: 'It's Sarah and Kelly, and they say Rachel's dead.'"

Rachel Corrie, 23, had been crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip. According to witnesses, the bulldozer's driver had driven straight at her, then reversed over her, even though she was clearly in his line of vision.

Rachel was a volunteer for the pro-Palestinian direct action organisation the International Solidarity Movement and the youngest of the Corrie's three children. Her death propelled her family into an almost decade-long battle for accountability and justice. What Cindy describes as "a milestone" in that fight will come on Tuesday, when a court in Haifa hands down its verdict in a two-and-a-half year civil lawsuit brought by the Corries against the state of Israel.

"If you had told me 10 years ago that this would happen to us, and I'd do any of the things I have done since that time, that any of us would, I'd say you're crazy – I won't even breathe again," says Cindy. "Always for parents there's that dread of something happening to a child. I don't even know how to describe how we got through those first minutes and hours."

More at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/26/rachel-corrie-mother-not-end