Remembering My Father by David Holbrooke

Festival Director published a piece entitled Remembering My Father in the Daily Planet during this year's festival:

Someone asked me not long after my father died if we were going to hold a service for him in a synagogue. My first reaction was to laugh, because he wasn’t religious in any way that I ever saw and to hold his memorial in an official place of worship would have seemed off to me and not true to him.

While he didn’t have a religious faith — or even really any spiritual sensibility — he certainly had a strong belief system.

For instance, he believed in the mission of the United Nations and its potential to bring peace to the planet. He believed — as many of you know firsthand — in reaching out to friends who were struggling, telling me once that when you’re up, there are lots of friends, but when you’re down, no one calls. He believed you should never turn down a job that hasn’t been offered and, that whenever someone gives you a bulletproof vest to wear, you should definitely wear it.

As it often happens, sons can be quite different from their fathers and that is certainly the case with us Holbrookes.

My brother Anthony is a sculptor and I am a filmmaker and have directed several documentaries about faith and religion. I know my father was proud of the films that I made, but I also know that some of the unanswerable questions raised by this work weren’t really his thing.

You see, he was interested in questions that had real world answers, while my work — and my personality — has made me more willing to engage in the unknown and ask questions like, what is the definition of a soul?

What I came up with as an answer — what I have come to believe in my own layman’s way — is that a soul is what you leave behind. It is that essence of you that stays and lives on with people and in places long after you are no longer there.

And if I think of my father in that context, I am comforted by the huge presence that is his soul. Sadly, it was only with his death that I have really begun to understand what it was that he left behind.

Shortly after my father died, I received an e-mail from Christiane Amanpour, who sent a photo of a lovely city, under snow, twinkling in Christmas lights. She wrote: “This is Sarajevo, New Years not long ago. Bright, shining, at peace, and with a future for her children. Thank you Richard.”

I certainly feel those children, that city, that country, are a big part of what he left behind, but I also know there are countless other people around the world whom he touched during a life that was simply extraordinary in its scope and scale.

On a personal level, I also know another big part of his soul is his four grandchildren — Bebe, Kitty, Wiley and Cyrus. Even though they didn’t begin to know him well enough when he was alive, they will know him from what he left behind.

While I’m not sure whether these amazing children will try to follow directly in any of the big footsteps that preceded them, I know they will live a life that is consistent with what their grandfather believed — that we all have to work to bring about a bright, shining, and most of all, peaceful future for not only Sarajevo’s children, but for all children of the world.