By Lawrence D. Blum, M.D.

(This article was published in the newsletter of the Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology)

Words will bring no one back from the dead. But sometimes they can help the living. In the face of unspeakable tragedy, talking is at once an act of helplessness and of hope. A terrible experience can be more bearable if it can be understood, if it can be communicated, if we are not alone with it. Words can bridge distance and darkness.

We are educated, in the aftermath of tragedy, to expect shock, denial, grief, fear, and rage, and indeed we feel all of these. We must also confront our own terrible helplessness, our inability to protect our loved ones, our countrymen, ourselves. There are times when we are wounded, and there is nothing we can do but to suffer it.

We may feel helpless, but there is a lot we must do: we have injured to treat, dead to bury, families to comfort, enemies to face. We have enormous physical tasks of clearing debris and rebuilding. And we have emotional work: we also will have to mourn, and for a long time. We will mourn for our lost loved ones, for our sense of security, for our comfort and our children’s. We will mourn on behalf of all that our countrymen and our country have lost. We will mourn because we know that it could have been us, and that emotionally, symbolically, it was us. We will, as we should, return to movies and baseball, but we know that no family of any fireman or policeman in the country will ever feel the same as before.

Everyone mourns in his own way. Some need company, some solitude. Some may need conversation, quiet, or distraction, or all of these in alternation. Feelings need to be respected. Professionals who work with trauma victims know that an adult may suddenly experience wishes for the comforts of childhood, such as crying on Mommy’s lap, or sucking his or her thumb. It may help to understand that this is not unusual; the mind is searching for solace in every way it can.

We will have public mourning and public funerals, and we need them. But they can never be sufficient to assuage the private grief. Things will never be the same. But wounds heal (although they leave scars). Time helps. Understanding helps. Relationships with others help.

In the end, we have each other, our families, friends, community, country. In our Declaration of Independence our founding fathers placed their names under their final declaration that “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” In the immortal words of the Englishman, John Donne:

No man is an Island, entire of it self, everyman is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.