I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance.

All these things have happened in our history, and we need to talk about them. What kind of country are we that our history is so tragic?

I feel like my soul is aching for the country. … There's not a day that goes by where I'm not putting on my shoes, or brushing my teeth, where I just think about the ordinariness of, people who just went to a concert, or the ordinariness of the day from people from 9/11, who were just doing an ordinary thing, and then you never get home. … So, I would say that these days of crisis and tragedy are to remind us all to be present in the ordinariness of our lives, that actually turns out to be extraordinary, when the person you love doesn't come home at night. I pay attention to things, you know? … This is to make us all more awakened about our own life, and the fact that it shows up this way is a horror. But, as I heard someone say, seeing people coming together, helping each other — whether it's this crisis we're in or what we saw weeks ago in, in Houston, in Florida, and now in Puerto Rico — it shows the humanity of us all. So, it's an opportunity to show the best of ourselves, when the worst shows up.

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

Here tragedy seems to follow upon tragedy.

Tragedy is the common lot of man. 'So many people have lost children' I remind myself. pp 178-179
This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering - no matter how multiplied - is always individual. p 179

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief — how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

Our national story has its full share of grief and pain as well as triumph and expectation. But through it all, hope remains and dreams do not die.

The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime.

One of the most revealing things about a country is the way it takes the threat of war.

What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.

Nothing captured human interest like
human tragedy.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.