They say a child learns about the world from the mother's face. If that face is serene, the child will come to expect the world to be a calm, predictable place. If the face is anxious, then all bets are off if the child will even attempt to navigate that hostile setting.
Now we can add something to that truism: we can read the love the mother had and likely still has for her child from her face after the death of that child. And we're reading such suffering in the face of Madonna Badger, whose three daughters died in a Christmas fire, and Joan Didion, whose daughter died from, it seems, a confluence of factors.
Didion records her pain in her book "Blue Nights." When she gets on the other side of shock and despair, we hope that Badger renders a portrait of the experience in a documentary.
My loss of the little ones I have so loved - my dogs and cats - has been recorded in my opinion-editorials on pet grief for THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Believe me, that has helped. Yet there isn't a day that goes by since 1982 that I don't have flashbacks of how it was together. In my life are two 16-year-old felines. When they pass on, I will probably pack up and move to Spain. For me, the memory bank is nation-bound. Spain is another country.
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