By:John C. O'Connell
It's been three weeks. People around the village, everywhere actually, are still finding it impossible to choose the right words. Tragedy. Awful. Incredible. So sad. Devastating. Terrible. Yes, all those words are right.
Priests at Holy Name of Mary and Blessed Sacrament, where there have been four funerals or memorial services already, are eloquent and inspiring.
Their tender theology gives what insights and condolences
are possible to begin the mending of broken hearts of weeping widows and now fatherless families.
A most poignant observation came this Saturday from a bagpiper at Robert Caufield's Memorial Mass. He said, essentially, that people are missing the trees for the forest. The numbers of World Trade Center presumed deaths - 5,582 at last count - so overwhelms, so chokes us
that we myopically focus on the enormity of the gross loss. He said we shouldn't forget, we should never, ever lose sight of the most horrible fact: it isn't 5,582. It's one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one....
The sickening loss to the Caufield family, and the York family, and the Zaccoli family, and the Giammona family and the other Valley Stream families to come, and the loving friends of all those who have died, are individual losses. Their pain is for the one they lost.
Maybe it's natural for those of us who didn't personally know someone in the towers or the Pentagon or on the planes to think in totals. Still, the piper is right. We must grieve them like we shed our tears, one by one.
