November 5, 2006

URS is a species that deals with death by dealing with our dead. As Western Christians marked the feasts of All Saints and All Souls last week, Chinese Buddhists observed the festival of Cheung Yeung, gathering in cemeteries with banners and flowers, incense and food, to sweep the graves of their ancestors.

We do this much as the ancients did, with a sense that the dead are still among us and must be appeased, once or twice a year, lest we be forever haunted. Like the ancients, too, we moderns are vexed by the absence of the dead, and by their presence. We remain between rocks and hard places: our fears and faiths, our griefs and gratitudes, our despairs and hopes. We seek a peaceful rest for them so we can rest in peace.

Nowhere are these vexations more acute than in Lower Manhattan, where bones of the dead have been recently found at the World Trade Center site, and will be, we are told, identified. It is the good news and the bad news.

Among the many cruelties of that September was this: not only did they die, they disappeared. We never got them back to let them go again, to wake and weep over them, to look upon their ordinary loveliness once more, to bear them to their final dispositions. For the families of more than 1,000 dead, no identifiable trace has ever been found.

The recent discoveries at ground zero fan doubts about how the original search was done, outrage over the general effort to ''move along'' and hopes that something, anything might be found to connect the dots between what the heart fears, the mind knows and the spirit rejects. Still, in many cases, there is no rest, no peace, for the dead or for the living who love them.

Without a corpse, without whatever remains, we are left with conceptual, intellectual, virtual realities. The heart rails against such uncertainties.

So Cajuns in Louisiana were washing gravestones last week, and Mexicans observed the Day of the Dead with festive processions of ghosts and skeletons, while out across the nation suburban youngsters done up as monsters and goblins whistled past the graveyards, tricking and treating their ways to some understanding of these mysteries and actualities.

We deal with our dead in manageable doses of ritual and custom, costume and metaphor -- we get them to oblivions of our own choosing: the grave or tomb, fire or sea. It is the transport all funerals must accomplish -- getting both the dead and the living to the edge of a new reality, a world changed awfully and still, just as awfully, where life goes on.

That first April of our misadventure in Iraq, in this newspaper an image appeared of a man kissing a skull that was found in a shallow grave outside a prison in the city of Baghdad. The number on the grave corresponded to a number in the gravedigger's log. The name and the number and the grave and the skull belonged to the man's son who had been taken away years before. There is a litter of other bones, femurs and ribs, and the man in the photo is strangely pleased. This is the seeing -- hard as it is -- that is believing. It is the certainty against which the senses rail and to which the senses cling. This is the singular, particular sadness salvaged from the general sea of sadness: one with a name and a history and family.

The globe is littered with such graves as these, people killed by others of their kind, by hate or rage or indifference. Many of the graves will never be found and the dead wander in and out of life, never fully here and never really gone.

Whether they are victims of famine, atrocity, terrorism, casualties of a widespread war, part of a local or global tragedy, they are no less spouses and parents, daughters and sons who are missed not only in the general sense, but missed in their particular flesh -- in beds, at desks and dinner tables, over drinks and talk and intimacies -- the one and only face and voice and touch, a particular body and being that has ceased to be. Their deaths, like their lives, belong to the precious few before they belong to the history of the world.

The efforts to find them, however hurried, heroic or thoroughgoing, will always and ever be too little, too late. All we can ever do is our meager best. The mayor and the medical examiner, the families of the dead, the world at large -- all of us are caught in the same conundrum.

The impossible business of the world proceeds apace while the lost remain with us and out of reach. The worst that can happen is always happening. Life goes on. Wherever ground zero is, wherever the bones, witness and remembrance are the best we can do. And pray for peace, wherever that might be.

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