When physical damage overtakes the body's limited capacity to repair itself, stillness replaces pain. The result is the same when we simply grow old, but with lethal wounds that are accidental or inflicted, dying is telescoped. The other wounds defy sight. They are goreless, dry, lodged beyond bullets in a territory medicine cannot describe. Soul is a warmer word, but one so appropriated by musicians and churches that it no longer conveys a room of one's own.
Psyches have properties that outreach the physical.
Today the black-faced birds must be crying the same bleak message. The message is grief, individual and collective. Unlike the study of physical medicine, knowledge of grief has not leaped with the centuries. You soon learn this if you attend meetings of the Compassionate Friends, a self-help group for people who have lost a child through illness, accident, suicide or murder. T.C.F. has more than 1,000 branches worldwide, one of them in Tasmania.