Just a hundred yards into the cemetery, the din of city traffic fades respectfully. The graves have all types of markers. We pass a memorial to the victims of the fallen towers, the tomb of Louis Armstrong, and a statue of a distraught woman in robes draped over a headstone. Other markers are far less conspicuous, barely an inch above the ground.

Shair cuts across the lawn and I stick with him, grass crunching beneath our feet. My low heels sink into the moist earth. He stops so abruptly that I almost walk into him. I immediately take two steps back and almost lose my balance.

The borders of this section are marked off with soaring trees. Standing a few feet ahead of a row of storied evergreens, Shair cups his hands in prayer. My eyes fall to the ground, to the stone pillow at the head of the plot.

Kareem Nabi.

From the dates carved beneath his name, I understand this is Shair’s son. Here lies the boy who, as a teenager, had seen my first blood.

“Aye, bachem,” he sighs. “May God forgive you and me both.”

He reaches over and brushes curled leaves away from the headstone. With a grunt, he gets on his knees and begins to pluck blades of grass around the edges of the stone.

“I kept him from war for as long as I could. I called in every favor. I begged. I threatened. I made promises I knew I couldn’t keep,” he says. My heart betrays me, pinching in my chest to hear a father mourn his son. I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my shoulders back as Shair continues. “It was becoming impossible, and I was out of favors, out of money. I had to get him out.”

Shair tells me that he paid a smuggler to take his son to Czechoslovakia. Kareem was alone there, a teenage boy. It was two years before the rest of the family joined him.

“He was in a youth home. No one to look after him. All kinds of kids around him, plenty of them bigger than him. Older than him. He never told me what he went through there, but it changed him.”

These are the familiar stories of refugee families, who are sometimes driven piecemeal from their homelands.

“By the time we were together again, he barely spoke. My daughter, to this day, cannot bear to be away from her mother. My youngest,” Shair says, shaking his head, “he is too busy with his friends to make something of himself.”

A bird takes flight from an oak tree, soars above our heads, and lights on a nearby tombstone.

“What happened to Kareem?” I ask.