Look at the best-seller list. I know this territory well. Without death, this space might have emptied long ago. When I began this column 12 years ago, my family was young, my daughter was still in preschool, and my husband played tennis. I hesitate to wonder how long I could have kept at it, had we stayed in one piece.
Happiness makes poor copy.
But I had no time to worry. In a flash, I was indoctrinated into a new discipline of tragedy, with its own vocabulary of regret, bitterness and self-loathing. The crepe and the kriah are in my signature and stamp. The shadow transformed everything, colored every story, from the developments in the former Soviet Union to events at hearth and home. Death, the great teacher, had its own ideas of what course was best for me.