The last embrace.

ONE NIGHT I STAND IN THE SHADOWS and watch my wife cradle our sleepy, leggy daughter. Something in this ordinary extraordinary embrace brings to mind the teenage girl murdered with her mother in EL Salvador in 1989--housekeepers for six Jesuit priests, also machine-gunned to death by soldiers trained in Georgia by the United States Army. The girl's name was Celina, and her mother was Julia. They died in each others' arms and were buried together. Next day I rifle through my desk for this drawing, which is so true and so awful and so moving that I had to take it down from the wall where it hung. It was too touch--too honest, too raw, too heartrending to see 20 times a day. It is horror and fear and rage and loss and agony and a wordless howling prayer. It is love, screaming. It is the same desperate embrace in which a Judean woman wanted to hold her dying son as he hung on the Hill of Skulls....

BRIAN DOYLE, editor of Portland Magazine and author of Credo (St. Mary's Press). Etching: Woman with Dead Child, by Kathe Kollwitz (1903; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY).