"Normal will never happen again"

What are some of the more unusual responses people have to a sudden death? Is becoming manic or behaving in some other seemingly inappropriate fashion a more common response than we might assume?

It happens a lot. One of the most difficult things after you lose someone is the first time you laugh. The first time you laugh, you're just jolted that you could actually laugh. You feel incredible waves of guilt.

The most common response -- you hit it right on the head -- is becoming manic. You will just run and occupy yourself to stay busy with every little task you can in order not to think.

You get hyper-efficient?

Yes, you overorganize and try to oversolve. These are all things we do to try and make sense of something that's nonsensical. One of the ways is that you become manic. Another is the exact opposite: You can become incredibly withdrawn to the point of not eating; you're not coming out; you might stay in bed for two weeks.

And another very common response, which many people don't realize, is there's actually a tendency to revert to a very primitive, almost an animal-like, state where you'll find yourself going outside and being very aggressive and making sounds like howls; it's a very primitive state. I can only come up with the explanation that because the loss is so deep it penetrates into very different parts of yourself.

On 9/11 there were a lot of people killed at the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania crash as well, and those events have not gotten anywhere near the coverage of the WTC attack. It would seem that the loved ones of the people lost at those sites must be dealing with a very different set of circumstances, in that there's so much attention given to the WTC victims and yet their relatives are just as dead also due to a horrific event.

I've talked to people from the Pennsylvania crash: relatives and also other people who lost someone at the WTC; widowers who see Lisa Beamer at the Olympics, with the president -- and many feel as if she's a spokesperson, and many others feel as if she's taking away their room to grieve, too, that it should be all or nothing, their grief is just as important.

We don't know what really happened, and even with the tape and knowing that certain people were primarily involved [in trying to overpower the hijackers], I think it's important to recognize that probably at the end, everyone, or many people, had a hand in it. I think we can get so focused on the lead characters that we can forget all the other people that were probably supporting them. But that's only natural: How do you cover a story of 80 families instead of casting one person as the model to represent that tragedy?

Again, it's our affinity for creating a narrative to help us explain such things to ourselves, and that's very natural, but at some point we have to be respectful of the fact that we've hurt many people by following Lisa Beamer's story in People magazine -- the birth of her baby and everything was wonderful, but what about all the other families? A roundup might have been a better way to be respectful if that's the media's concern with the grieving process.

The intense media focus on an event such as the 9/11 attacks results in an extraordinary abundance of tragic images -- in magazines, on television, on the Web. In the case of TV and online news coverage, the 9/11 images, some extremely graphic, were seen over and over again. How does repeatedly viewing these images of carnage and death affect our ability to cope with such a tragedy?

I believe it actually assists us. The more information we have, the better we're going to be able to process it. I think that's why you see so many people glued to these events.

I think the reason people watch it is that they want to have an opinion, they want to understand it, and to do that they need information. Especially something like 9/11 -- the more you understood what happened, the people involved, you saw the faces, the more it gave you the pieces to decide, OK this is what happened and this is how it affects me and this is how I need to feel.

One of the most appropriate media responses to come out of the 9/11 tragedy continues to be the New York Times' superb series of profiles, "Portraits of Grief."

Yes, I think that's an incredible way, a very intelligent and respectful approach to how to cover this story, as well as anyone that's doing roundup pieces. This didn't affect one family or three families -- let's look at what really happened here and all the different situations and all the different backgrounds [of the victims and their families].

One of the things that amazed me in the initial reporting was how many of the employees were covered who were from the big firms, the brokerages and so forth. And I wondered, what about the janitorial staff? the dishwashers? Where were they? Why weren't they showing up in the news?

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