What Do We Do?

What can the living do in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, where loss has greeted us twice on a national scale in such a short span of years?…You are in your kitchen or your backyard or stuck on an endless elevator ride. You are sitting with a book in the park. Perhaps it is an image you remember having seen…Whatever it is that comes to you in three months, six months, a year or more, don't turn the page of your book and forget, don't stab the elevator button trying to hurry up the trip. Stop.

These tragedies, it's worth remembering, grant us an opportunity to understand what is perhaps our finest raw material: our humanity. The way we at our best treat one another. The way we listen to one another. The way we grieve…

So grieve for the particular lives that come to you….Let them guide you to understand that it is our absolute vulnerability that provides our greatest chance to be human.

This passage is from this morning’s New York Times, “Living With the Dead” by Alice Sebold (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11sebold.html)


There is not much to add to this, though I have one comment. Both of my parents died this year. One thing good that has come from this is that I feel it has left me with a soft heart, maybe what Sebold would call a vulnerable heart. I treasure this softness.