Legacy MattersFrom The Daily Undertaker
Funerals are the means through which we travel from death, back into life. They are important and meaningful to us as individuals and as a culture. In contrast to the United States, where funerals and other memorial rituals seem to be on the wane, the people of Ireland hold fast to their funeral traditions.
The following article by Marie Murray, ...conveys the importance and meaning of funerals better than any I've read in a long time.
Funerals form an integral part of Irish life, Recognising the beauty of an Irish lament
WHATEVER HAS been lost in Irish culture, the tradition of funeral going has not died. Attending funerals remains an integral part of cultural life.
Funeral going is psychologically complex. It is comforting to those who mourn; recognition of the life of those who have died; and a celebration of their existence. It allows lament for their departure and acknowledgment of the loss for those who loved them.
Funeral attendance is a statement of connection, care, compassion and support. It encircles those who grieve and enriches those who attend because it connects each person there to the profundity of living and the inevitability of death. Funeral attendees witness the raw emotions of grief and the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to love.
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But there is psychological reason, social solidarity and cultural cohesion in funeral attendance, and even as the ceremonies, the belief systems they operate from or the expression of grief may change, the meaning of marking death remains, and long may we travel highway and byway to do so.
For St Patrick's Day, here is an Irish lament.
In Born Toward Dying Richard John Neuhaus writes about his first experience of dying. Worth reading and rereading
A measure of reticence and silence is in order. There is a time simply to be present to death—whether one's own or that of others—without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it. The Preacher had it right: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance." The time of mourning should be given its due. One may be permitted to wonder about the wisdom of contemporary funeral rites that hurry to the dancing, displacing sorrow with the determined affirmation of resurrection hope, supplying a ready answer to a question that has not been given time to understand itself. One may even long for the Dies Irae, the sequence at the old Requiem Mass. Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla: "Day of wrath and terror looming / Heaven and earth to ash consuming / Seer's and Psalmist's true foredooming."
The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it. Traditions of wisdom encourage us to stay with death a while. Among observant Jews, for instance, those closest to the deceased observe shiva for seven days following the death. During shiva one does not work, bathe, put on shoes, engage in intercourse, read Torah, or have his hair cut. The mourners are to behave as though they themselves had died. The first response to death is to give inconsolable grief its due. Such grief is assimilated during the seven days of shiva, and then tempered by a month of more moderate mourning. After a year all mourning is set aside, except for the praying of kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on the anniversary of the death.
In The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries calls us to "the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners' bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship—all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity." From the pity we may hope that wisdom has been distilled, a wisdom from which we can benefit when we take our place on the mourners' bench.
Resilience, Not Misery, in Coping With Death
Orthodox psychology has long emphasized the grim slog in store for those who must live without the people they cannot live without. Freud called it “grief work,” a process of painfully severing the emotional ties to the deceased. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross mapped out five morose stages of effective grieving.
But if you actually talk to the bereaved, says George A. Bonanno, you find these classic perspectives are pure — well, Dr. Bonanno doesn’t actually say baloney, but so he implies in his fascinating and readable overview of what he calls “the science of bereavement.”
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A professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, Dr. Bonanno has now interviewed hundreds of bereaved people, following some for years before and after the fact, looking for patterns.
His conclusion: the bereaved are far more resilient than anyone — including Freud, and the bereaved themselves — would ever have imagined.
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Not so, Dr. Bonanno maintains. In contrast to the grim slog of Freudian grief work, the natural sadness that actually follows a death is not a thick soup of tears and depression. People can be sad at times, fine at other times. The level of fluctuation is “nothing short of spectacular”; the prevalence of joy is “striking.”
Now on his sixth installment of Heaven: It Ain't Boring, Berger is setting out to debunk what he says are "myths" about heaven and dying.
Forget about serenely playing the harp on a fluffy cloud. Berger says heaven is a dynamic place of fun, culture, creativity and happiness.
"When you read the Bible and see what's going on in heaven, there's nothing boring about it. There's nothing boring about God," he said. "Why would God's heaven be boring? The creator of the universe? Come on."
Son's death motivates pastor's study of afterlife
From The New Old Age, Maybe Grief Isn't So Bad After All
In “The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss,” Dr. Bonanno does not minimize the acute sorrow people feel when someone they love dies. He acknowledges that a small proportion of mourners — 10 percent to 15 percent, he reports — have long-lasting depression and distress and may benefit from medical intervention. But most people are, to use the term he does, resilient: they fluctuate between pain and happier emotions, seek comfort, maintain their equilibrium and, before long, find renewed meaning and pleasure in life.
“Most bereaved people get better on their own, without any kind of professional help,” Dr. Bonanno writes. “They may be deeply saddened, they may feel adrift for some time, but their life eventually finds its way again, often more easily than they thought possible. This is the nature of grief. This is human nature.”
Is this haunting picture proof that chimps really DO grieve?
United in what appears to be deep and profound grief, a phalanx of more than a dozen chimpanzees stood in silence watching from behind the wire of their enclosure as the body of one of their own was wheeled past.
This extraordinary scene took place recently at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, West Africa.
When a chimp called Dorothy, who was in her late 40s, died of heart failure, her fellow apes seemed to be stricken by sorrow.
As they wrapped their arms around each other in a gesture of solidarity, Dorothy's female keeper gently settled her into the wheelbarrow which carried her to her final resting place - not before giving this much-loved inhabitant of the centre a final affectionate stroke on the forehead.
Father Stephen Freeman writes about the Orthodox custom of remembering the dead on Soul Saturdays and how they have become in his life.
After becoming Orthodox in 1998 these Memorial Saturdays became supremely important in my life. Our congregation suffered two very unexpected deaths (both in car crashes) in the course of our first two years that left all the devastation that grief can wreak. For a congregation that was young, we were suddenly faced with that which faces the old with great frequency.
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Thus it was that “Soul Saturdays” became times of deep importance for me. The population of my “grief world” was far larger than I would have expected by that time in life. Praying for the departed, and doing so with such frequency was a part of the Tradition of the Church that seemed in my first introduction – not only wise, but completely essential.
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Grief is strange stuff. I was taught, when I was doing hospice work, that each grief is really every grief - that one small grief will open up the vast pool of grief that lies within us. Thus none of us is ever just grieving one person or event. Blessedly, it is all in the hands of the good God who loves mankind and who Himself bore our grief.
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I know that I could not bear the weight of all I remember were I not able to stand with others and pray God’s eternal remembrance. There are times as an Orthodox Christian that I am not just grateful for the grace God has given, but wonder how I ever tried to live without it.
From American Digest PUDDY: The Gift
You can take lots of rides in this life, but a full sled careening down a hill of fresh snow is the closest to a ride of pure joy as you can get. You'll find it near the top of my list of "Best Moments in This Life." It's probably on yours too. If you've never done it, move it to the top of the Bucket List now.
The man buried here died in his 45th year: R. Scott Puddy
On the morning of June 18, 2002, Scott perished doing what he loved: practicing aerobatics in a Yak-52, in the mountains of Brentwood, Calif.
He was survived by his parents, his sisters, and his daughter.
The dark secret fear lurking inside you when you are a parent is that your children will die before you do. That fear came true for this family. All parents can imagine their grief, but all choose not to do so. But they did not choose, as so many do, to be utterly undone by grief. Instead they chose to balance grief with joy, "For Joy and sorrow are inseparable," and place upon this grave a bronze symbol of all that is best in this life and in this world.
It's a gift to their son, R. Scott Puddy, and a gift to any in the world who chance upon his grave. It's a gift outright.
After a Death, the Pain that Doesn't Go Away
..an estimated 15 percent of the bereaved population, or more than a million people a year — grieving becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function.
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There is no formal definition of complicated grief, but researchers describe it as an acute form persisting more than six months, at least six months after a death. Its chief symptom is a yearning for the loved one so intense that it strips a person of other desires. Life has no meaning; joy is out of bounds. Other symptoms include intrusive thoughts about death; uncontrollable bouts of sadness, guilt and other negative emotions; and a preoccupation with, or avoidance of, anything associated with the loss. Complicated grief has been linked to higher incidences of drinking, cancer and suicide attempts.
“Simply put,” Dr. Shear said, “complicated grief can wreck a person’s life.”
It's not unlike post-traumatic stress disorder. Using cognitive behavior therapy or EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) shows very promising results.
EMDR is considered a breakthrough therapy because of its simplicity and the fact that it can bring quick and lasting relief for most types of emotional distress.
EMDR is the most effective and rapid method for healing PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) as shown by extensive scientific research studies.
The EMDR therapy uses bilateral stimulation, right/left eye movement, or tactile stimulation, which repeatly activates the opposite sides of the brain, releasing emotional experiences that are "trapped" in the nervous system. This assists the neurophysiological system, the basis of the mind/body connection, to free itself of blockages and reconnect itself.
There is a great difference in the grieving of those who have faith. Glimpses of grace in a mother's suffering
Mary Ellen Barrett, who writes a homeschooling blog at Tales From the Bonny Blue House, recently suffered through every parent's worst nightmare. In August, her 14-year-old son Ryan, who was autistic, wandered over to a nearby creek during an annual father-son camping trip and was gone before anyone knew what happened. He was found dead in a lake the next morning.
This is what the grieving mother wrote on her own blog
To learn to embrace the suffering and turn it to some use has been, at times, a nearly impossible task for me. I miss my Ryan so badly it is a physical pain that just will not go away. A stabbing knife in my chest that often makes it hard to catch my breath.
To sit at the foot of the cross in the real way that Dave and I have this past month, it is necessary to surrender to God and to just trust that His plan is for our ultimate salvation. I confess to having my moments of bewilderment/anger at why God called Ryan home but I pray through that and ask Ryan to pray for me. I know that Ryan is happy in heaven, that he is doing good there.
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So the grief crashes over us in waves. Mind numbingly, over-powering waves and then we gasp and stick our heads up and catch our breath. We see the world around us and the love being bestowed on us and we know it is good.
Sitting at the foot of the cross gives others the opportunity to minister. We have been so cared for and generously provided for in the last month. I still receive a delicious hot dinner every evening at 5:00 pm. I We spent this last weekend in a beautiful New England resort owned by my cousins, being catered to as if we really deserved such treatment. The dearest friend in the world and her husband and children still take care of so many details of daily living for us so that we no longer have to think. The generosity of our parish family, community and homeschool group have been unimaginable. Thank you all dear people.
In the Boston Globe, From grief comes giving
For six months now, Michael, Karen, and their daughter, Julie, have been without Lex, their blond, brown-eyed 22-year-old son, who died after a brain aneurysm on a Tiverton, R.I., beach in January.
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A few months after Lex died, Michael decided that his family still had a lot to offer. All they needed was somebody to give it to.
What if these parents without a son looked for a son without parents?
At first, Karen was horrified: She worried her husband was trying to replace Lex. But Julie helped persuade her that this was a way forward, a way to avoid surrendering to grief.
“You make a decision to live or die,’’ Karen says.
And so the Iris-Samuel Rothman Scholarship was born. The Rothmans named it for their parents, not for Lex. They have more than enough reminders of him already.
The scholarship includes up to $10,000 in tuition and other assistance, but that’s not the main thing. In addition to the tuition help, the Rothmans want to be there for young men who might not have anybody else to turn to.
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-A few weeks ago, they met Vincent Nguyen, a 21-year-old Vietnamese immigrant from Plano, Texas. Raised by his grandmother after his parents split, the aspiring doctor was alone in the world and heading to Columbia University. The Rothmans were immediately struck by the personal essay in his online application.
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But from the very first, it was almost like they knew each other. Vincent needed the Rothmans, and they him.
The sad story of the parents who so grieved the death of their son 5 who had been paralyzed in a car accident and died of pneumonia that they carried off his body in a rucksack and, in a final family outing, drove to a seaside cliff where they leaped to their deaths.
They just couldn't live without Sam...their happy little miracle.
Loving Neil, 34, and Kazumi, 44, had given up their jobs to care for Sam after a car crash paralyzed him from the neck down at the age of 16 months.
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Proud Neil wrote: “Even though Sam can’t move below his neck he fills a room with his character and chat and it is an absolute joy to us to see what he will say next.
“It is normally, ‘If I am good can I have another present please!’
“All this from a boy given no chance of survival after the accident. He is growing up so quickly and is so intelligent and mischievous. We cannot thank all of you enough for your help.”
Just months before meningitis struck, the couple wrote: “Sam loves his life and he is simply the happiest boy in the world.”
Now that they have found a debris trail, we are beginning to learn what happened to Air France 447. France is sending a research ship equipped with two mini-subs but the chances of retrieving the "black box" in the vast deep ocean remain slim.
But whether lightening and heavy turbulence , an electrical failure or a bomb took it down remains to be seen or may never be known.
A past flight may offer clues that a computer system may have gone rogue.
"It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible," passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. "The worst experience of my life." Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. "She crashed headfirst into the roof above us," he told a reporter. "People were screaming," said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. "We saw our own deaths," said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son's wedding. "We decided to die together and embraced each other."
After seemingly an eternity — in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds — the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer and made an emergency landing at a remote military and mining airstrip 650 miles short of Perth.
Neo writes about the initial emotional impact on the families.
This tragedy, already almost unbearable for the loved ones of those who died, contains the added painful possibility that the bodies of the lost may never be recovered. And all of this happened in an instant; families and friends were waiting at the Paris airport for an ordinary happy arrival, and then they received the dreadful news that will change their lives forever.
Now are learning about the 228 people lost . Among the victims on Air France Flight, Doctors, Dancers and Royalty.
They were dancers and doctors, engineers and executives, and even royalty. Many were parents, and eight were children.
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The airline said victims included 2 Americans, an Argentine, an Austrian, a Belgian, 58 Brazilians, 5 Britons, a Canadian, 9 Chinese, a Croatian, a Dane, a Dutch citizen, an Estonian, a Filipino, 61 French citizens, a Gambian, 26 Germans, 4 Hungarians, 3 Irish, an Icelander, 10 Italians, 5 Lebanese, 2 Moroccans, 3 Norwegians, 2 Poles, a Romanian, a Russian, 3 Slovakians, 2 Spaniards, a Swede, 6 Swiss and a Turk.
So sad.
A very interesting piece on the difference between male and female grieving.
Bereaved fathers find healing in bonds of friendship
For Bigham, it was a tutorial of sorts, taught by those whose children had died before his daughter. "They looked more normal than I felt," he says. "I had a sense of a road map out of here, light at the end of this deep tunnel I'm in."
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As time went on, the men realized that they were consoling, teaching, and learning from one another more than they had in any counseling session. But they do not just sit around talking. They do stuff: hiking, dining, shooting pool, drinking beer, going for an overnight in New Hampshire. Paintball is on next month's agenda.
That, says therapist Thomas Golden, is one difference between male and female grieving. Women tend to interact through talking, men through action. "What men need is to be shoulder to shoulder with other men who are going through the same thing," says Golden
The dome of the cathedral at L'Aquila after the earthquake
Italy Mourns Earthquake Victims
The funeral for about 200 the earthquake victims in L'Aquila took place outside because none of the region's churches were stable enough for the ceremony.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and other key government officials were among the 10,000 people attending the outdoor ceremony beneath Abruzzo's snowcapped mountains.
Mr. Berlusconi comforted mourners, shaking hands and giving hugs before the ceremony began. "Today will be a moment of great emotion. How can one not be moved by so much pain?" Mr. Berlusconi said, shortly before departing for L'Aquila for the funeral. "These are our dead today, they are the dead of the whole nation," said the prime minister.
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The Vatican granted a special dispensation for the Mass. Good Friday, which marks Jesus' death by crucifixion, is the only day in the year on which Mass in not normally celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, presided over the Good Friday funeral Mass for about 200 of the dead.
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Sobbing mourners gazed on coffins adorned with mementos of the dead -- a boy's toy motorcycle, a baby's blue T-shirt -- comforting each other as they said farewell at a funeral mass for Italy's quake victims.
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"This is the time to work together," the pope said in a message read by his secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein. "Only solidarity will allow us to overcome this painful trial."
Death on a Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus
Such was the curious bond between Jesus and Mary, in the cradle and on the cross. As a baby he first awoke to the Absolute—to “God”—in the loving presence of a mother who was for him the reassuring field of reality. She was the secure field of all being in which he received unqualified permission to be. The alternative to her was not to be, and that alternative was unimagined and unimaginable because she was. Only later, and with difficulty, does the child learn to distinguish between the love of God and the primordial love of the parent. For most of us the distinction is never absolute, and perhaps is not meant to be.
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Her heart would break before she fully understood, with a shudder of fear and wonder, what it was that she had been telling him when she whispered to the baby, “You will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. And of your kingdom there will be no end.” Perhaps, she was at times tempted to think, it was a mistake to tell him. But she finally had no choice except to follow, step by step, the way of the strange glory to which she had said yes. She was the instrument, she was the mediator, of the secret into which he would grow. And now his “hour” had come, and it had come to this, here at Golgotha.
In going through the papers of her late husband, Amy Wellborn came across this column Michael Dubriel wrote in 1995 entitled Remembering the Dead.
If my great-grandfather was present when visiting his wife's grave, he would speak to her in his native Polish in a quiet voice as though he was informing her of the latest news. My father was more reserved in the visits to his father's grave, but somehow I knew that these visits somewhat the same purpose -- to keep in touch with those who had formed and shaped our lives by their presence. Even though they were gone, they were still very much present to us.
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My parents and grandparents did not forget the past. The visits to the cemetery were an act of reverencing and honoring the memory that was still very much alive to them of their deceased par ents and spouses. They dealt with the image in the rearview mirror by pulling off the road and confronting the image ob an ongoing basis.
What allowed them to do this was a belief that life did not end in the physical death of their loved ones. As believers in God who had rescued their loved ones from death by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they realized that those who had died were not gone.
That is not all. They believed tha they could still help their deceased love ones complete their spiritual journey toward God. These cemetery visits always concluded in the same way. All who were present would kneel on the ground over the grave, and we would pray, usually an Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be. These visits kept the memory of our loved ones before us as we remembered the way they lived and the impact they had on our lives as individuals.
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Yet such is not the case anymore. During the past 14 years, I have been involved in various forms of pastoral ministry. I have witnessed a new phenomenon that is the opposite of my childhood memories. Rather than remember the dead, people actively try to forget that their loved ones ever existed. The ideal funeral of the 1990s seems to be the following, according to my experience: The deceased is cremated soon after death. The ashes are strewn either over the ocean or over some other peaceful spot. The problem with this is not that it is against any prohibition of the Catholic Church (it no longer is). The problem is that there is no place to reverence their memory or the effect that they still have on our lives.
Meghan O'Rourke details the grief she experienced following the death of her mother
"Normal" vs "complicated" grief
One afternoon, about three weeks after my mother died, I Googled "grief."
I was having a bad day. It was 2 p.m., and I was supposed to be doing something. Instead, I was sitting on my bed (which I had actually made, in compensation for everything else undone) wondering: Was it normal to feel everything was pointless? Would I always feel this way? I wanted to know more. I wanted to get a picture of this strange experience from the outside, instead of the melted inside.
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Grief isn't rational; it isn't linear; it is experienced in waves. Joan Didion talks about this in The Year of Magical Thinking, her remarkable memoir about losing her husband while her daughter was ill: "[V]irtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves," she writes.
She quotes a 1944 description by Michael Lindemann, then chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He defines grief as:
sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.
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One thing I learned is that researchers believe there are two kinds of grief: "normal grief" and "complicated grief" (which is also called "prolonged grief"). Normal grief is a term for the feeling most bereaved people experience, which peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. ("Complicated grief" does not—and evidence suggests that many parents who lose children are experiencing something more like complicated grief.) Calling grief "normal" makes it sound mundane, but, as one researcher underscored to me, its symptoms are extreme. They include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.
Crying as Catharsis Isn't Always the Case
“You can’t work through grief if you’re stuck in protest crying, which is all about fixing it, fixing the loss,” Dr. Nelson said. “And in therapy — as in close relationships — protest crying is very hard to soothe, because you can’t do anything right, you can’t undo the loss. On the other hand, sad crying that is an appeal for comfort from a loved one is a path to closeness and healing.”
You know those people you like but haven't heard from in awhile. Varifrank writes
I hadn't heard from him in awhile, so I looked him up today and discovered in the process that he was no longer with us. There are times when a Google search can be like the 'angel of death' and this is one of them.
Now it seems my friend will never retire to the Harney desert and I should stop waiting for a call for lunch that will never come. And I now find myself four years late in grief to the man who once taught me the meaning of the word "crisp".
David Frum has a lovely small essay on Charles Dickens's novel, The Old Curiousity Shop and its most famous scene, the death of Little Nell.
The death of Little Nell is supposed to have been inspired by the death of Charles Dickens' beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, at age 17 in Dickens' then home in Doughty Street. (Still standing by the way.) At that time, the death of the young was a harrowing but familiar experience. Of Dickens' own 10 children, one died before the age of 1, and another died aged 22. Dickens could expect many of his readers likewise to be touched by similar losses - and to share his intense need to absorb and understand their loss.
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For all the medical advances of the 20th century, death remains omnipresent and always will. We've all had losses, and we all struggle not only with the immediate grief but with the longer-term sadnesses and paradoxes of survivorship. Say what you will about Dickens - but have those feelings ever been described better than they were in this one passage from Chapter 17? Nell has entered a quite country graveyard and is studying the humble headstones of the poor people buried there:
I gong to pluck just a small portion of the scene but for its full impact you should read it in its entirety.
Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and moaned and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how when she first came to that place, a young creature strong in love and grief, she had hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to be. But that time passed by, and although she continued to be sad when she came there, still she could bear to come, and so went on until it was pain no longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she had learned to like
I learned about Obituarieshelp.org from Melanie Waters who wrote to tell me about her website that turns out to be a wonderful resource for grieving people who must write an obituary or a eulogy or friends who want help to write a letter of condolence.
She says "ObituraiesHelp.org is a work in progress. I'll be adding to it weekly until ObituariesHelp.org becomes the one unified source online for Funerals, Obituaries, and Sympathy and Condolence resources."
For genealogists, obituaries are often the best way to learn about your ancestors and Melanie provides many links and resources.
A site to bookmark.
When that Marine Corps jet crashed in San Diego, it killed two woman and two children. Remarkably, the husband who survived, a Korean immigrant named Dong Yun Yoon told the media he did not blame the pilot.
Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident," a distraught Dong Yun Yoon told reporters gathered near the site of Monday's crash of an F/A-18D jet in San Diego's University City community.
"He is one of our treasures for the country," Yoon said in accented English punctuated by long pauses while he tried to maintain his composure.
"I don't blame him. I don't have any hard feelings. I know he did everything he could," said Yoon, flanked by members of San Diego's Korean community, relatives and members from the family's church.
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Yoon named the victims as his infant daughter Rachel, who was born less than two months ago; his 15-month-old daughter Grace; his wife, Young Mi Yoon, 36; and her 60-year-old mother, Suk Im Kim, who he said had come to the United States from Korea recently to help take care of the children.
Yoon's minister, Daniel Shin, told reporters the Yoon family had moved into the house a little more than a month ago. He said Yoon came to the United States in 1989 and had since become a naturalized citizen. Yoon works as manager of "a variety store -- a store where they sell a variety of things," Shin said.
Yoon's wife came to the United States about four years ago, Shin said.
Yoon spoke softly when he talked about his wife.
"It was God's blessing that I met her about four years ago. She was a lovely wife and mother," he said.
His voice fading, he added: "She loves me and babies. I just miss her so much."
HT Michelle Malkin
It seems to me that his religious faith and patriotism helped him find a forgiveness so deep, it leaves me awed. What a noble example he is, one I will not forget.
Little Moshe Holtzberg cries for his mother during a memorial service in Mumbai for his parents, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were taken hostage, tortured and killed by the terrorists during the Mumbai terror attack.
Even the little two-year-old did not avoid a beating as bruises were found on his back. He was rescued by his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel who, when the terrorist attack began, locked herself in a room with another staff member. The following morning, she heard little Moshe crying for her and went to look for him. She found him, his pants covered in blood, crying beside the motionless bodies of his parents. She grabbed the baby and ran outside even as the terror attacks on Nairman house continued.
The state of Israel sent a plan to Mumbai to carry back the bodies of the Jewish victims along with little Moshe and his nanny who was the only person the traumatized toddler responded to.
At the funeral in Israel, Rivka's father revealed was six months pregnant.
The rabbi who delivered the eulogy said,
'You don't have a mother who will hug you and kiss you,' Rabbi Kotlarsky cried out during a eulogy that switched back and forth between Hebrew and English. But the community will take care of the boy, he vowed: 'You are the child of all of Israel.'
Painting by Emile Friant, La Toussaint.
Via Tea at Trianon comes Chrysanthemums and All Souls' Day
Halloween is barely noticeable in France. The same cannot be said of All Saints' Day, La Toussaint (November 1st) and All Souls' Day, the Day of the Dead, the Jour des Morts (November 2.) La Toussaint is a national holiday.
This is a time for families to bring fresh flowers, mostly chrysanthemums, to the tombs of their departed loved ones, much as in the 19th century painting below. Cheerful mum blossoms are everywhere in Paris now.
I remember how surprised I was when I moved to California to note that these flowers have no funeral connotation in the United States. They grew to amazing masses of pink, red and gold in my Los Angeles garden (indeed chrysanthemum means "gold blossom" in Greek). But in France they are the flowers of the dead.
More evidence that what you intuited is true.
Talking about death eases end of life for patients, loved ones.
Researchers led by Dr. Alexi Wright of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of the American Association on interviews with 332 terminally ill cancer patients recruited at seven outpatient clinics. Patients who said they did not have end-of-life conversations got significantly more aggressive care in their final week of life, which was linked to lower quality of life near death. Their caregivers also suffered, feeling regret, poor quality of life, and a higher risk of developing depression.
Patients who said they did have end-of-life discussions were more likely to have a better quality of life in their last days, less likely to get aggressive care, and more likely to receive hospice services. Their loved ones said they felt less regret, and better quality of life, during their bereavement.
"Our results suggest that end-of-life discussions may have cascading benefits for patients and their caregivers," the authors wrote.
AND then came the outpouring: for weeks after, people I barely knew would come into my office, gently shut the door and burst into tears. I heard stories of single and serial miscarriages, pregnancies carried nearly to full term, stillbirths — all the lost, lost children. Grief hauled about, and nowhere to put it down. Some said they had never told anyone; who would understand?
Knowing My Stillborn Son
From Roman Christendom Mourning: to comfort the bereaved and to pray for the dead.
Praying for the dead is, for those who have forgotten it, a grave duty for all Catholic Christians and one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy. The purpose is to deliver one's loved ones out of the painful, suffering process of purgation that all but the most perfect must endure after death before they are sufficiently pure and holy to be ushered into the presence of Almighty God who is all love. No taint of self-love must remain to those who come before God.
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Now this duty is easily forgotten in a busy world and so we wear mourning to remind us to pray regularly throughout the day and night for our dead.
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The length of mourning depended on your relationship to the deceased. The different periods of mourning dictated by society were expected to reflect your natural period of grief.
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for a widow 2 to 2 and a half years and a widow did not enter society for a year (although she could re-marry after 1 year and 1 day if financially necessary);
for a widower 2 years;
for a parent 2 years;
for children (if above ten years old) 2 years;
for children below that age 3 to 6 months;
for an infant 6 weeks and upward;
for siblings 6 to 8 months;
for grandparents 6 months;
for uncles and aunts 3 to 6 months;
for cousins, great aunts and uncles, or aunts and uncles related by marriage from 6 weeks to 3 months;
for more distant relatives or friends from 3 weeks upward.
Eleven-year-old gorilla Gana was holding her three-month-old baby in her arms on Saturday in her compound at the zoo in Munster, northern Germany, when it suddenly died.
Initially puzzled, Gana stared at the body, bewildered by its lifelessness.
For hours the distraught mother gently shook and stroked the child, vainly seeking to restore movement to his lolling head and limp arms. Visitors to the zoo openly wept as they witnessed her actions.
Hours passed, during which Gana continually prodded and caressed the dead child, to no effect.
More Miss Marple than 007: The True Face of British Espionage.
Just about every adult has experienced the grief of losing a loved one. In time, we move on keeping the loved one as a blessed memory, no longer a painful one.
Some people, a minority to be sure, never get over it. Years later, they still feel the loss acutely.
Complicated grief can be debilitating, involving recurrent pangs of painful emotions, including intense yearning, longing and searching for the deceased, and a preoccupation with thoughts of the loved one.
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Reporting in the journal NeuroImage, scientists at UCLA suggest that such long-term or "complicated" grief activates neurons in the reward centers of the brain, possibly giving these memories addiction-like properties
Addicted to Grief? Chronic Grief Activates Pleasure Areas of the Brain
"The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them," O'Connor said. "After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward.
"Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it," she said.
The Chinese earthquake in Sichuan province was so huge in its impact, in the numbers of dead, in the tragedy of the schoolchildren crushed in their schools, in the grief of parents losing the one child they were allowed, that I've been unable to get my mind around it.
"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic, " Joseph Stalin said. What can we make of the latest statistics from the Chinese government.
62,664 dead
23,775 missing
358,816 injured
638,305 rescued and evacuated
Or these
5 million were left homeless
Floods now threaten the 700,000 survivors
69 dams are now in danger of bursting.
When I saw this photo of family members searching for their missing, I began to feel for the agony of numbers beyond measure.
Many victims were buried quickly in mass burial pits and China's Rush to Dispose of Dead Compounds Agony.
They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.
This photo broke my heart. Tiny Bodies in a Morgue
Yesterday was designated World Day of Prayer for China by the Pope who composed a prayer for Our Lady of Sheshan.
A broken heart really is fragile says a new study and men are more susceptible to dying on anniversaries of a loved one's death according to new research from the American College of Cardiology.
Heartache and Heart Health Connection
In France, parents now have the right to register a name for an unborn child as well as the right to claim the body of their child and to claim maternity leave.
Up until this point, the body of the unborn child was incinerated by the hospital along with other waste tissue.
French Court: Parents Can Register Names for Fetuses
There is an increasing recognition in medical circles that miscarriage or stillbirth can be an extremely traumatic experience for mothers and fathers alike, who may have developed a profound emotional connection with their unborn child. "The mourning process can be long and lonely," says the Helping After Neonatal Death (HAND) website. "After the death of a baby, it generally takes twelve to twenty-four months simply to find your new base."
Many parents have found that the process of grieving is helped significantly by the giving of a name to their child. "Giving the baby a name and having the baby baptized or blessed, if such rituals are important to us, are ways for us to acknowledge the reality of the life that has come and gone so quickly," says HAND.
Being able to name your loss will help many grieving parents. Pro-abortion activists are unhappy.
Countess Mountbatten was in the family boat when it was blown up by the IRA one summer August morning, killing two adults, two young boys and leaving three fighting for their lives.
"My own memory," says Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, "is of a vision of a ball exploding upwards and then of 'coming to' in the sea and wondering if I would be able to reach the surface before I passed out.
I have very vague memories, now and again, of floating among the wood and debris, being pulled into a small rubber dinghy before totally losing consciousness for days." In her lucid intervals, unable to open her eyes, or speak, or even weep, she began to realise that a monstrous swathe had been cut through her family.
Her father, her mother-in-law, her 15 year-old son Nicky dead. Nicky's twin brother Time was left terribly injured and blind in one eye.
"As anyone whose child dies will know only too well, this news utterly devastated me," she says. "In fact I was so overwhelmed by grief for Nicky, who was just on the threshold of his life, that I began to feel guilty that I was not able to grieve for my father, whom I really adored, in the same way.
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For almost the past 30 years, Lady Mountbatten has been turning her personal loss into a force for good - not just mending her own shattered family but using her experience to help other bereaved parents, through her support of two charities, the Child Bereavement Charity and Compassionate Friends.
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Lady Mountbatten once confided that, before the bomb, she "would have said that the death of any of my children would have killed me as well, taken away completely my own wish to live".
Through sheer force of personality, that didn't happen. In her endorsement of the Child Bereavement Trust's new book, Farewell, My Child, she refers to "the seemingly endless black tunnel" through which those left behind have to pass to reach "the light that truly does appear at the end, and which we eventually found ourselves".
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Though 84 and now widowed, she is in no way to be pitied. The robust family spirit, a tensile weave of humour and stoicism, runs through her conversation, her lively dress sense and her manner.
Her features are still beautiful. Pinned to her ruffled fuchsia blouse is a brilliant yellow butterfly. Her purple and pink chequered tights make me feel dowdy. Survivor is too feeble a word for her.
"She has that half-full attitude to life," says Jenni Thomas, founder of the Child Bereavement Charity, which trains and supports doctors and nurses in bereavement counselling. "We find her an inspiration. You come away feeling better for meeting her. She'll quietly listen to someone in trouble and then put her wisdom to it."
Hats off to a remarkable woman.
Having been a young widow, I can attest that the needs of those widowed at a young age are quite different than those widowed in their sixties or seventies.
Meeting others: Young widows, widowers find support in new group.
The inability to accept the inevitability of death can ruin your life as this book reviewer writes about Susan Sontag's son and his book,
"Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir" (David Rieff)
From the NYT review entitled A Fight for Life Consumes Both Mother and Son.
“A bad death” is another matter. We all know those when we see them, the miserably protracted and painful affairs that overwhelm everyone — the deceased and survivors alike — with panic, guilt and bitter regrets.
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Obviously,” Mr. Rieff says, “there is no comparison between the sufferings of a person who is ill and the sufferings of those who love them.” Still, one suspects he got the worst of the deal, for despite what he describes as a tense relationship with his mother, he was cast in the role of head cheerleader. His job was to enthusiastically endorse her struggle, always to be optimistic and supportive and never, ever, to talk about death.
“What she wanted from me was an adamant refusal to accept that it was even possible that she might not survive,” Mr. Rieff writes. Ms. Sontag “might be covered in sores, incontinent and half delirious,” but Mr. Rieff would “tell her at great and cheerful length about how much better she seemed to look/seem/be compared to the day before.”
Months of this duplicity left him guilty and miserable, obsessively revisiting every decision again and again, even — and especially — after she died.
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He and his mother will undoubtedly survive for a long time to come in medical school courses on death and dying — as a case study in how not to do it.
Miriam Greenspan on Moving from Grief to Gratitude Through a Glass Darkly,
Platek: You speak of an “alchemy” by which grief can ultimately be transformed into gratitude, fear into joy, and despair into faith. How does that work?
Greenspan: Let’s begin with grief. There is a kind of shattering that happens with, say, the death of a child, or any death, but perhaps most of all violent death. Not only is your heart shattered; you lose your sense of who you are and what your life is about. So reconstruction is needed. But first we need to accept that we are broken. This initiates the “emotional alchemy.” If we can hang in there with grief, it changes from a feeling of being “hemmed in” by life to a feeling of expansion and opening.
We will never get back to the way we were, but eventually we reach a new state of “normal.” I’m not talking about the mundane kind of “getting back to normal,” in which we find ourselves doing the laundry again (although that is important too), but the deeper kind, which is a process of remaking ourselves and how we live.
Grief is a teacher. It tells us that we are not alone; that we are interconnected; that what connects us also breaks our hearts — which is as it should be. Most people who allow themselves to grieve fully develop an increased sense of gratitude for their own lives. That’s the alchemy: from grief to gratitude. None of us wants to go through these experiences, but they do bring us these gifts
via Judith Shapiro at Remembering Matters
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Henri Frederik Amiel
Life After Steve Irwin
A woman Terri once met wrote her a “fabulous” letter after Steve’s death to say that when her husband, a policeman, died in the line of duty, she found that “after about three years your grief walks beside you” rather than filling almost every waking moment. This has helped Terri to contemplate a receding of the rawness: “I thought, thank you for that because it feels like I have a cinder-block where my heart was, and I ponder how long you feel that way.”
About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad. If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing. But to keep that changeling - suffering changeling - any longer, could better none and nothing. Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself. He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him.
My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene - 'O let him pass,' Kent and Lear - was played for me here in the first moment of my return.
Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, June 1887.
HT The Sheila Variation, "O Let Him Pass".
A new blog for me, Postman's Horn posts a letter every day by authors, writers, poets and painters because
A letter can provide that sense of everyday life, a glimpse of the the trials and tribulations of another human soul; and they can underscore the humanity of writers who have become so very famous.
My condolences to Yaacov Ben Moshe on the death of his father whose remarkable In Honor of a Great Dead White Man pays tribute to his greatest hero who
even though he always knew that life can be hard and even cruel, he never lost sight of the fact that it is always wonderful and miraculous at the same time
Especially in this month of All Saints and All Souls, we pay attention to the best of those who have passed before us because
The consequence is that human solidarity, to use that term, must belong much less to the crowd of our predecessors, than to the persons of the past who have realized, in a great way, the fine natural traits of man. Those who pass up the opportunity to serve their great memory, pass up an undoubted opportunity to help themselves, to correct themselves, and to improve themselves.
Charles Murras on All Souls Day
A tender story in Time, Ruth and Billy Graham's Final Farewell.
"No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock," Billy Graham observes, "and it still hurts very deeply." Ruth and Billy would have been married 64 years this month.
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so he has a new tenderness for all those who mourn, that they will be comforted.
Grief is a demanding guest in an old man's house. Let sorrow settle in, and in time it no longer feels like home. His daughters had the hospital bed removed and restored Ruth's room as it used to be, warm and inviting, not sad, so it looks as if she's just away on a long trip. It was Billy's habit, through all their decades of work and travel, to call her every evening at about 5. These days, as twilight rolls around, he finds himself wanting to pick up the phone and call her and then remembering that he can't. "Sometimes I'll be preoccupied with something, and suddenly I'll be reminded of her for some reason," he says, "and I'll find myself almost overwhelmed." One way he copes, he says, is by thanking God for the years they had together. "They are over now — but God was good in giving us to each other, and I want to be grateful for those memories and not suppress them." He has pulled out some of his favorite pictures of Ruth and put them on his desk to remind himself.
We asked him whether, with all our advanced medical technology, we perhaps fear death and fight it too much. "I think we often do," he said. "I'm convinced that in some cases we aren't so much prolonging life but prolonging death." ... But death is a reality common to us all, and for me as a Christian it isn't something to be feared, because I know what lies ahead for me beyond the grave."
He's "bloody furious" with the police
"Here we are taking dad to the cemetery and we are all pulled over and there are accidents behind us. It was just like dominoes."
Mourners crash like "dominos" after cop stops hearse.
Chocolate, the all-purpose mental health food, eases the dying of a difficult mother who reconciles with her daughters.
Death and Chocolate: A Sampler for the Psyche.
It's the elders among us who handle the details of death and show us how to grieve. Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I didn’t want to become ‘old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on the box “How To Be An Elder,” are simple: ‘Be there for others as much as you can. Be there, and be there some more.’ It sounds so easy, but it takes cojones y ovarios. Big ones. Funny isn’t it, being an elder takes being more like the valiant creature: what did I say a brave ‘pet’ was made of? “Loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful?” Yes, like that, in human proportion. No one is sprung full-born elder, like Aphrodite on the half-shell. I’m can see that I am working on it, finding the ways. Probably all the rest of my life long.
I Promise the Last Voice You Hear Will Be One of Such Love: Pet Loss
via Ambivablog who wrote
As she anticipates the loss of an aged, cancer-stricken Dalmatian ("Pepino is our relative. That's all there is to it"), she knows it will reopen in the whole family the barely clotted, bottomless wound of the recent loss of a child. The one thing you do not want to be at such a time is alone, and it is when family (blood family with all its capacious adoptions) rises up and shows its stuff.
What is grieving for and what purpose does it serve?
Dennis Prager understands more about the nature of grief than some of the university officials at VT who planned the convocation "to begin the healing process" in You're Dead, I'm Healing.
I believe that this early healing talk is both foolish and immoral.
It is foolish because one does not speak about healing the same day (or week or perhaps even month) that one is traumatized -- especially by evil. One must be allowed time for anger and grief. To speak of healing and "closure" before one goes through those other emotions is to speak not of healing but of suppression.
Not to allow people time to experience their natural, and noble, instincts to feel rage and grief actually deprives them of the ability to heal in the long run. After all, if there is no rage and grief, what is there to heal from?
Dr. Sanity is even better on the importance of proper grieving.
Indeed. There is this strange belief among the intellectual elites; even among many psychiatrists and mental health professionals that feeling anguish and grief are wrong and must be avoided at all cost. Or if you must feel them, then they must be instantly transformed into a focus on this thing called "healing"....
These well-meant but ultimately invalidating pressures to "begin the healing process" actually hinder the natural expression of normal grief, which can only come about after painful reflection and the resolution of a variety of conflicting emotions, including anger, sadness, hopelessness, outrage and regret (to name just a few).
Appropriate mourning also requires coming to terms with the nature and manner of the loss; a quest for justice on behalf of the victim when appropriate; and even the painful re-living and re-experiencing of what happened; until it can be completely processed and internally metabolized.
It hurts and hurts and hurts. But that is how we grow.
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The major ingredient of a normal grieving process is time. It cannot, nor should it be expected to, be resolved or "healed" in a day, or a few days, or even a month or two. For the families of those who died, it may take years and years.
She ends.
If nothing else, we owe it to the memory of those we have lost not to "heal" too quickly, but to take the time to experience the pain and suffering of their loss; transforming it slowly into personal growth and wisdom.
Kathy Shadie warns against the Disneyfication of grief.
Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.
Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.
She's right.
For those with faith Our dead are not absent and Love never ends.
The great and sad mistake of many people -- among them even pious persons -- is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes . . . Oh infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent. They are living near us, transfigured into light, into power, into love.
After a loved one dies, the most common reaction is yearning, not depression, a study shows, underscoring what most anyone knows.
Yearning most common after loved one's death
The study found that the most characteristic feature of bereavement after a death by natural causes "is more about yearning and pining and missing the person -- a hunger for having them come back," said senior author Holly Prigerson, director of Dana-Farber's Center for Psycho-Oncology and Palliative Care Research.
"The focus on depression is misguided," she said in an interview. Yearning "really dominates the psychological picture, (with a feeling) that a part of you is missing and that without this essential piece you won't be happy."
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"People never get over a loss, they just get used to it," Prigerson said. "Even years after someone dies, they get pangs of grief, they need to think about the person, and they miss them with heartache," she said. "That's normal. But intense levels beyond that become problematic."
A quiet grief that lasted 50 years. From Neonatal Doc, comes Parent.
What does it mean to weep for a star whose life we did not share?
In Mourning Still for a Fallen Star
Two months after Irwin's death, however, I am still chatting online with others -- strangers, though I know their names -- who were touched by his life and death. With the Internet's discussion boards, Web cams, video on demand, we can mourn indefinitely, easily and privately, in our cubicles and home offices.
Paradoxically, our collective mourning has become a solitary experience. I have a global electronic community of other mourners, from Brisbane and Bangladesh to Florida and Minnesota. On message forums, we think we've found kindred spirits, although with the anonymity of the Web, it is hard to know if that is true. No matter. You float a question on the ether -- I am fourteen and cannot stop crying for Steve. Is there anyone else out there? -- and receive dozens of sympathetic replies.
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Michael C. Kearl, a professor at Trinity University in Texas, has written about celebrity death in the online "Encyclopedia of Death and Dying." He suggests our grief may be triggered because the celebrity reflects who we are or want to be.
Paul McCartney was so grief stricken when wife his first wife Linda died that he could not write or play music for two years.
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He was composing a classical album for a choir and orchestra when Linda died of breast cancer in April 1998. The work, Ecce Cor Meum, Latin for Behold My Heart, is finally released tomorrow.
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For a couple of years I couldn’t do anything, really. I was just grieving,” he says. “And when I eventually came back to it I started doing some particularly sad bits.
There is a piece called Interlude. It still affects me. It is quite a sad thing. The chords are very sad and it is strange, really, how something with no words can affect you so deeply, can affect your emotions.
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I gradually got back into it through that. I just sort of wrote my sadness out. I was able after a year or two to pick it up again and complete it.
Widow asks 'pathetic' thief to return flag.
A “pathetic” thief robbed more than a Marlboro woman’s patriotism, he ripped off an American flag dedicated to her husband’s World War II service and his bravery back home.
Edna Straw, 89, said her 8-foot by 4-foot old glory was ripped off this week by a heartless crook who has no clue it once draped her husband’s coffin.
Who would steal a flag? Pathetic is right. All the widow wants is for the thief to just leave it on her porch and go.
Online memorials bring strangers and friends together in community of grief.
online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life
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While many non-Western cultures build rituals around death that allow a person to grieve over time, in highly individualistic societies, losing a loved one can be isolating, some psychologists say, which may be why some turn to the Web to reach outside their traditional social network.
"When death happens, we're so alone," said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. "It would be nice if we had a sense of community, and maybe that's what the Internet provides."
Some sites such as Legacy.com, Memory-of.com and Mem.com have been around for about a decade and provide software tools for users to customize their Web pages. Legacy.com and Memory-of.com charge one-time fees of $50 to $100 for a permanent place on their sites. There are other, smaller sites started by funeral homes; still others are set up by individuals who purchase domain names in honor of the deceased.
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"It's become a lifeline for a lot of families," said Henry Chamberlain, chief executive of Memory-of.com. In its early days, when the Web site went dark for a few hours, panicked users would e-mail and call, feeling as if they were reliving the loss of their loved one, he said.
The Internet's constant availability makes it possible for people to grieve in their own time.
Vicky Armel, 40 years old, a loving wife and mother of two, took a job that put her life on the line.
A police officer and a detective, she was murdered last week in a shootout in Fairfax VA. Her killer was a mentally disturbed teen-ager who had recently been arrested for car-jacking.
Villainous Company reports on her funeral.
And as we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I couldn't help noticing that the road was lined with cars. And people. Lots of people.
Lines of police officers, EMTs, and firemen standing at attention by their vehicles. That was moving.
But what really astonished me was car after carful of ordinary families who turned out to pay homage to a slain Fairfax County police detective. These people had to have been standing by the side of the road for hours. We were late getting out of the service. Many had flags or homemade signs or stood silently with hands or caps over their hearts.
Some were saluting, at full attention, ramrod straight.
For mile after mile as we drove, literally every overpass we went under was filled with people, and every single one sported a fire truck, often with an American flag hoisted between two cranes. It is a long, long way from Vienna to Warrenton. I have never seen anything like it - as the landscape slowly changed from concrete highways and skyscrapers to rolling green pastures and horse farms, the only constant was the silent embrace of a community that turned out by the thousands to say goodbye to a fallen officer: black, white, brown, professionals, civilians, young and old. It was something I didn't think existed in this jaded world anymore: a sense of community.
Last week, a friend asked me who I thought was the greatest living American. Without a single conscious thought, the words that came out of my mouth said those whose jobs require them to risk their lives for strangers because they let me live the life I enjoy so much.
After reading about the funeral of Vicky Armel, I realize how many people think the same.
The deepest condolences to her husband and children and may their deep pain be mixed with deeper pride.
The closest bonds we will ever know are the bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow - Cormac McCarthy.
From Sunday's New York Times Magazine comes an interview with the Latin American writer Carlos Fuentes.
You've had more than your share of sorrows.
Most of all not having my son around. I was very proud of him. He was a very good painter. He had hemophilia. He died six years ago. Natasha, my daughter, just died last summer.
How do you get up in the morning after that kind of loss?
You go on. You go on. You bring the person you love inside you. That is how you cope. You make him or her live within you. The whole experience I had with my children is in me. It is nowhere else I can see. I can see a photograph, I can feel sad, I can read a poem, but the experience of having them within myself is what matters.