ABSTRACT

It seems our humanity is most engaged at just such times, when the power of our presence, our witness, our willingness to listen to the most difficult and inexplicable facts of life—we love, we grieve, we breed, we disappear—is better medicine than any easy answer. Humankind consigns its dead to oblivions we choose—the grave, or flames, or tomb, or sea, or open air. And the doing of it is the way we deal with it. These hard duties have their comforts. Like any good wake or shiva well sat, the time since the disaster has given us pause—time for all the high energy, labor intensive, often untidy rubrics of grief that must be conducted when there has been a death in the family. As a nation we've behaved much like any large and sorely damaged, close-knit if occasionally dysfunctional group of relations dealing with heartache and permanent loss.