I just read a blog my mother posted, about a twitter friend, @megapixel, who was killed in a head on collision last week. Reading it, the shock of death hit me, even though this was a woman I didn’t even know had been alive until after she was dead. I found myself clicking through to the news story to read how, and to discern – could it have been avoided? Could I learn something to avoid, or get calming knowledge that it wouldn’t happen to me for some reason?

This human response is interesting, like when one cries in a movie when a main character dies. We don’t when that guy who we didn’t know and obviously was unimportant bites the dust, but we are capable of getting attached to someone we see in many scenes, who we identify with, and then at some point we cross a threshold and it’s like we know them, and when the expire we are hit in the face with the awfulness of it all. How is it we can get emotional over someone portrayed fictionally by an actor who we know is just fine and will ride again? And why can we get emotional over someone real who we knew not at all?

I suppose it has to do with a combination of the smack of reality and the efficient use of emotions. If we fell apart every time we knew anyone was leaving this world, we could never get up. Yet also, when we get to know someone’s story, and it comes to an end, we are hit with the reality of it all. That feeling occurs in the pit of your stomach – “It’s too awful! It’s isn’t to be borne! How can life be so cruel?”

I read two books recently from the perspective of a person in a war, in a situation that even reading about it decades and decades later you feel, with them, that it is too much. They were Hiroshima, an account of seven people who lived through the first atomic bomb dropped onTokyo, and All Quiet on the Western Front, about a young German soldier in WWI who fights in the trenches and there loses his sanity, his grip, his friends, and every remnant of the memory of normal life. They were different – Hiroshima was about survivors, and the latter about a man who fell just weeks before the armistice ended nearly five years of battle. Yet the experience was the same – circumstances so catastrophic and awful, the horror can hardly be carried through word form, and yet it is. The movie I saw today, Pearl Harbor, had similar stories, scenes, facts.

So, how does it work? Reading about the people left to wade through the human loss from the strongest bomb yet built, you wonder if those who died were the lucky ones. On the other hand, you can forget that even in a catastrophe, time moves forward for the survivors. The worst happens, and then the next day dawns, and new days keep coming and soon the people have buried the pain, or gone mad, and most stop questioning why or what if. We know not the day nor the hour, but time heals all things – at least in part, right? Can I assure myself and my fear, at least, of that? Survival comes first, then the next right thing. I have never been through such a disaster as these I have surveyed in print and film recently, but I can feel the heartbeat through them, of our strong and weak human sides battling, as we weep over the fallen in vain and somehow grow defenses against the too awful – it’s almost logical.

The study of human disaster and death is one that will go as long as there are people to do it.