The city editor who covered a fire as a City News Bureau kid, feeling sorry for herself in the cold, until the bodies came out and she learned they'd been murdered. And the veteran foreign correspondent, who covered the Our Lady of the Angels fire as a young reporter, and later the bodies strewn across Scotland in the Lockerbie terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. We appreciated why she wanted to go, we remembered why we did back then, and why we didn't now. When you're young, you don't have kids, they're not in your imagination on the scene. And please don't mistake me.
Cops see much worse, nurses, firefighters, paramedics.
I'm not comparing reporters to those people, especially cops. And I'm not complaining about the jobs we do. I'm trying to explain this feeling, and figure it out too for myself. Nurses and cops usually don't write about it afterward. They don't try to make you feel that sense of place.