This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
The Choice
by Marjory Hall
Hi, I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma with a BookByte for our 2025 Fall Read. American Mother by Colum McCann and Diane Foley is, as the title suggests, about a mother’s reaction to the death of her child. This mother, though, must navigate an unusual element of her child’s passing. Whereas many parents lose children to accident or disease, Jim Foley was murdered, and his mother has the opportunity to meet face-to-face with his killer. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have any children, so I don’t know if I can realistically fathom the depth of grief involved in losing a child. What I do know is that I would never want to meet the person responsible.
In some ways, I think, losing a loved one to a faceless disease or inexplicable turn of fate might be easier than knowing that someone intentionally extinguished a child’s life. The feelings of fury toward such a killer would be, for me, overpowering, even if that killer felt remorse. No amount of apology will bring back that beloved person. What must be the extent of those feelings when the killer shows no remorse, dismisses Jim’s death as one of many effects of war, and claims that all his actions were “without malice” (22)?
It might be that lack of emotion that would infuriate me the most. If Alexanda Kotey, Jim Foley’s murderer, had been compelled to kill to preserve his own life or in the heat of battle, there might be some chance of comprehending the act. Jim Foley, though, was a civilian noncombatant, uninvolved in the ideological struggles of ISIS in 2014. His execution was the measured action of men intent on violence in the name of religion, and that makes it incomprehensible.
I found that I had a very difficult time understanding Diane Foley’s decision to meet with Alexanda Kotey. I was full of suggestions of treatment that Kotey “deserved” more than a meeting with Foley. In the end, I see that Foley’s choice was the only one that would bring her peace. Knowing that Kotey’s worldview would never allow him to express regret for killing her son, Foley nonetheless interacts with him in respectful terms, according him the human dignity he denied to Jim.
She is rewarded when, in her words, she is finally able to cry. According to Foley, her tears are “a gift” of the Holy Spirit, freeing her and allowing her to move forward in her life (42). Diane Foley responded to her son’s death as her faith taught her instead of merely repaying deliberate cruelty with more violence and anger. I am Christian, but I don’t know if I would meet such a test as gracefully as Diane Foley. It is a sobering question to contemplate.
I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma, with a Book Byte for Fall, 2025.
REFERENCES
Hardy, Thomas. “The Man He Killed.” Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44329/the-man-he-killed.
McCann, Colum and Diane Foley. American Mother. Etruscan, 2023.
