The Lost

Just now, in my late-night procrastination rounds, I clicked on the NYT website only to be horrifed by news that everyone else has probably known about all day. How do you process something like that? 32 lives just over, with no forewarning, no illness, no reason, not even a bad reason . Strange to say all this only a day after Yom HaShoah, one would think we have the tools for processing these kinds of statistics, far more dismal ones in fact. But we don’t, sustained meditation on these losses is impossible. Even properly thinking about one lost person is impossible. There’s all this clutter, like on the Times homes page- advertisements, Sports, an article in “Praise of Plants.” 32 worlds have ended, but that’s not even close to enough to fill a newspaper. It makes me wonder what the point of all this commemoration is in the first place. I mean, I do it all the time, I am obsessed with the Holocaust, and even more consumed by recent experiences of loss. But the futility of it all upsets me sometime, as I forgot, get distracted, inevitably do a lousy job confronting absence.

How do we think about the dead? As they were when they were living? Well then they are ghosts, they aren’t dead, they are just memories of living people you will never be able to see again. What about their physical deterioration? That gets you closer I think, we’re able to think about pain, dying moments are a huge part of literature I imagine for that reason. It’s a bridge from life to death, a way to get closer to thinking about death. But actually cognizing it is really hard. Newspapers have their inadequate methods, but mine aren’t so much better. Ghosts and memories or descriptions of pain and suffering, that’s all I have. And even when I think about those things, I invariably end up more concerned with my immediate surroundings, with the ripple effects of absence. I guess that would a third way of thinking about death, the toll it takes on the living. But am I being silly for thinking that those three ways are still missing something- that we in our selfish, isolated bubbles of being alive can’t really care about anything outside of us. We’re programmed to go on, even if it’s really not fair that some people don’t get to.