Julia Keller has an article in the Chicago Tribune on literature and movies about people who disappear. (link via Bookslut) She mentions several titles, from Alice Munro's collection Runaway to the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan, but all of them she says are overshadowed by the events of 9/11. She writes:
What America learned from 9/11 -- what other nations already knew, from their own dread acquaintance with terrorism and the anguish left in its wake -- is that people can just disappear, can vaporize, can put on a hat and coat and leave in the morning and never come back, can turn a corner and fade from sight forever.
The piece is directed toward the idea that this is worse, that having someone disappear without a trace is more difficult to handle than a death:
What happens when people simply go away?
Not when they die, because that's a different species of grief. Death is final. Certain. Absolute.
When people depart out of the blue, they may indeed be dead -- but we don't know for sure. All we know is that they are suddenly gone, and that they do not, or cannot, return.
Okay, I have a problem with this. I know that a lot of writing has been done since 9/11 on how difficult it was for people to go to work and vanish; to not have a body to bury or an idea of what the last few moments of that person's life were like. And I sympathize, I really sincerely do. But I don't understand why it has to be considered worse if your loved one died this way as opposed to a "more conventional" manner.
In other words, what makes death by terrorism that much more severe than death by cancer?
What makes it that much harder to accept?
The worst is the emotional limbo brought about by a peculiar vanishing, by the wiping-away of a soul with no warning, leaving no trace. The worst is when a life is not demonstrably over but also not provably ongoing, when a disembodied person becomes the very embodiment of loss.
So this is the worst. It's not watching cancer eat my father alive, not seeing him lie in a bed for six weeks half paralyzed, not trying to understand what he wants to say as he struggles to find the words in a brain that no longer works the way he should - not seeing him jump in pain while he is sleeping because the maximum morphine dose he was receiving still wasn't strong enough to give him even a moment's peace.
It's good to know that there is literature out there that will show me how bad it really could have been; show me how I really don't know how bad it can be.
Relegated to that room is not only the random object, the fading photo, but also the hope -- the hope for a return to the ordinary, for the day when another door opens and the lost loved one walks in, unscathed and unchanged, and the clocks begin to tick again, and the world once more makes sense.
It must be so much more diffcult to know your loved one died in an instant; that they had minutes or only seconds to suffer as opposed to weeks of intense pain and years of treatment and broken medical promises. And it must be hell to hope they can come back some day; that they could be out there somewhere, living a life, and happy.
So much better to know they are gone forever, so much better to watch them die.
Gee. until I read this piece, I never knew how lucky I was.
(And could someone please tell me when this subject a) became a competition and b) was considered an appropriate topic for a literary discussion?)
