The Biehls Add Meaning to an Already Significant Life

All too often, we in the newspaper business write about people we don’t know much about. It’s an occupational hazard: Time constraints or just the inherent difficulty of really knowing a person’s nature conspire to foil us. Even when we eulogize someone, we sometimes cross our fingers and hope we got it right.

It was that way for me in August of 1993 when I put some thoughts down on Amy Biehl, the Newport Beach woman stoned and then stabbed to death that week in South Africa by angry members of a mob. Biehl, 26, was a Fulbright scholar working to improve the lot of blacks in South Africa, but in the ultimate irony that hatred can produce, this white woman was killed by blacks also opposed to apartheid.

What prompted my column four years ago was someone’s comment that Biehl’s death was senseless. I disagreed, saying her death had a heroic element because she had died in pursuit of a noble, if dangerous, cause. The outpouring of both white and black support at her funeral, it seemed to me, lent great meaning to her life.

So, I wrote that column about a woman I never knew. In truth, it was also meant for her parents, in the hope that they might draw some comfort from it. As with their daughter Amy, I knew nothing about Linda and Peter Biehl.

I know something about them now, however. And because I do, I have no uncertainty about what the Biehls are like; they’ve told the world.

Amy’s parents are in South Africa this week attending the amnesty hearing for the four men who took part in her death, including a face-fo-face meeting with the man who stabbed her in the heart. The hearing is to determine if the men deserve amnesty on the grounds that they killed Amy for political reasons.

That rationale alone would be enough to enrage most of us. An unarmed 26-year-old woman is stoned and stabbed, and her killers are claiming a political motive? How would parents find the strength or whatever not to give in to rage?

And yet, the Biehls aren’t among those screaming at the fates. They came to South Africa not with revenge in their hearts, but with reminiscences and reconciliation. They have said they will not take a position on amnesty for their daughter’s killers and will abide by a South African commission’s decision. It isn’t hollow talk--the Biehls long ago set up the Amy Biehl Foundation and helped fund it with their own money. The foundation is involved in social programs to improve the lot of South Africans, and the Biehls have returned more than once since Amy died to visit townships.

“We come to South Africa as Amy came,” Peter Biehl said at the hearing this week, “in a spirit of committed friendship.”

And as their daughter’s killers watched and listened from a few feet away, the Biehls recounted some of Amy’s thoughts and deeds during her 10 months in South Africa. Here was a photo of her working in a township, here was one of her teaching in a voter-education project; here was one of her in a marathon.

It was reported that at one point during their presentation, the man who said he stabbed her bent his head and wiped away tears. In the hallway afterward, the four accused men approached the Biehls to shake hands.

I don’t know how or from where people get the strength to respond as the Biehls have. I don’t know how they keep from lashing out in the courtroom as their daughter’s killers ask to be freed. I don’t know where the strength comes to listen, as the Biehls did, to the man who stabbed their daughter describe her final moments of life.

We can’t stop ourselves from suffering over the loss of loved ones. We can’t automatically tell ourselves not to hate, not to want retribution. No one would condemn the Biehls for stridently opposing amnesty for the men who killed their daughter. But even as the rest of us ask ourselves whether we would or could act as they have, we silently acknowledge that a deep level of humanity must spring from the Biehl family tree.

So, four years after my first and only Amy Biehl column, my doubts about this once-anonymous young woman and her family are gone. I still may not know them, but I do know them. Their words and actions this week in Cape Town make everything clear.

I’m now supremely confident that enough good things can’t be written about them.

As if Amy Biehl didn’t give her own life enough meaning, her parents have now gone halfway around the world and added immeasurably to it.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.