Packaging mourning...

Time doesn't cure all, but it sure adds noise to our original reactions. Six years after 9/11, and many of us are not sure what to feel. Remorse? Anger? Respect? Nothing?

If we look to the media today, we will see a minimum of sombre/emotional coverage, a few heated op-ed pieces ("Where's bin Laden?" and the like) and lots of fluff about Osama's new beard (and Britney's fat belly). Media would like to be able to mimic the human ability to mourn, to transmit the complexity of that emotional state, but in fact, it can't. It can however, simulate our tendency to feel less and less - feed our yearning for distraction as memory dissipates.

True, prolonged mourning is a psychic discipline few individuals are capable of. It requires actively keeping a (painful) memory intact, preserving it from the warping effects of time, fighting the all too human urge to let go and move on. I'm sure there are psychologists who would call it a form of mental illness. Not me though. Like all extreme states of being, I appreciate their existence, and would fight for their ongoing inclusion in our human apparatus.

(19th C funerary photo... think of the exposure time!)