I hope you will not mind if a stranger writes a message of his own. But this is also for you alone, Rachel, dead at 17, yet ineradicable because of the photograph of your bright and witty face, now sadly familiar to the country, and because of the loving and admiring testimonies of your family. I, who have lived more then three times your years, have rarely understood the occurrences and the people in the world that I have pretend to give order to. Yet I write sentences that end in periods. The problem belongs both to us and to those we hope to serve.
Journalists are pretty good at unearthing the undeep issues.
Give us a presidential scandal, even a war, and we can do a fair job of explaining the explicable. Journalists tend to turn to where the noise is. One of the things your death bequeaths is a reminder to where the noise is not. Your other bequest may be more useful still to journalists and everyone else. No life ends on a period, no matter how long it is lived.