Can a woman … have no compassion on the child from her womb?
—Isaiah 49:15
Bereavement. Weird thing. You have known for years an utterly kind, virtuous, and devout lady who suddenly tells you that K., her daughter, aged 31—also utterly kind, virtuous, and devout—has just died after a life of cystic fibrosis.
You attend the resultant funeral, whence you emerge more or less sentient but with the generalized conviction of having witnessed “King Lear’s” last act performed in the gulag. You do what pitifully little you can to console the family. You peruse the booklet’s utterances like “May the angels lead thee into Paradise” and “Day of wrath, oh day of mourning” and once your internal screams have died down, your general verdict approximates to Huckleberry Finn’s lit crit: “The statements was interesting, but tough.”
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