This has been a horrible, horrible holiday, not for me personally but in a wider sense. Two online listsibs lost their mothers in the weeks just before Christmas. I've just heard that a work acquaintance, someone I worked with fairly closely at my last posting, lost his daughter in a car accident on Christmas Day. Not only does he have to bury a child, which always seems the worst of personal tragedies, but his his three-year-old grandaughter (named Seven, oddly) is now motherless.
And of course this all pales in contrast to the tsunami death toll. Last I heard it's up to 144,000 and the news is rife with stories of parents whose children were ripped from their arms.
I'm not callous to the news, but somehow the deaths of people I know or of people close to the ones I know affect me more than those thousands in Indonesia. It's probably a universal human failing, but in another way it's not really a failing. I think it's because 144,000 deaths don't mean anything. They are a news item, an impersonal statistic I can't really understand on any emotional level. One death means something; one death can rend the world. Each of those 144,000 deaths rends the world for those that loved the dead person. It's not a tragedy, it's 144,000 individual tragedies. Some of them are even sadder, in a way, because no one's world will be rent, because every single person who knew or loved that dead one has also died.
It's going to be strange next year, when for some people Christmas will be the usual season of joy and for many, many, it will be the anniversary of tears.
Posted by dichroic at January 3, 2005 09:25 AM