I'm extremely sorry for your loss Eric. Emotional problems hit anyone, up to and including the highest rungs of governments. I'm coming away from your experience thinking that the only thing that's truly ours is our emotions and our feelings. We share words, we share thoughts, we share ideas, but we can't share emotions. Only we ourselves can feel our emotions and feelings. Ironically, that's the one area we all shun, running instead toward the collective, the word. I wonder if the desire to outrun emotions and feelings underlies collective amnesia (Gore Vidal's the United States of Amnesia, but certainly it's not just us). It certainly underlies all the conflict of the world. We can't deal with our emotions/feelings, but we can dump them on another, as your fiance's ex-husband did, and as every and all fight, from biggest to smallest, including invasions, has done. Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma } Andreas writes: ??I wondered if our society has a sort of social amnesia; general society remembers only the last few years (and only vaguely); the past slips away into a fog.? A little over five years ago, Sheri, the woman I loved and was expecting to marry was brutally murdered by her ex-husband. He, homeless, unemployed and alcoholic, had apparently come unexpectedly to her house before she left for work to ask Sheri to let him have their daughter for the day. He stabbed Sheri to death with a serrated bread knife from her kitchen and fled with their six-year old daughter Rachel. He killed himself and Rachel the next morning in an apparently suicidal head-on with a semi on a rural Iowa road. I was, at the time, the Chief Information Officer for United Airlines and, in that capacity, also the chair of a relatively newly-formed internet standards body called the Liberty Alliance. On the day Sheri was murdered, I was in Vancouver to convene the meeting of Liberty?s management board at which we were to approve the first round of specifications. It was the pinnacle of my career thus far. We had created the specifications in pretty much record time. As I was, increasingly frantically, trying unsuccessfully to reach Sheri, I was also being interviewed by the Economist, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about the Alliance?s planned announcement the next week. When I came back to work a couple weeks after the funeral, I had an odd experience. My office was in the southwest corner of the fourth floor of one of the two office buildings on United?s corporate headquarters campus in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago. It is an old building now, built, I believe, in the late ?60?s or early ?70?s. My office was enormous. It occupied enough square footage for several of the cubicles which lined most of the rest of the floor. The outer two walls were windows, almost floor to ceiling. On that sunny mid-summer day when I returned, I stood at the window looking out on the artificial pond at the center of the campus. It had struck me, as I walked from the underground parking garage, a space in which was one of the perks of my position as a senior officer, that Sheri?s death had faded from awareness for just about everyone in the building. As I stood there, I thought about how I was the only one who would always remember her death in just the way I remembered it. For a brief while my grief had been semi-public. Everyone who worked with me at United had known about Sheri?s death and the thoughtful expressions of their sympathy had been abundant. Her death and her ex-husband?s subsequent suicide/murder had been front page news locally for a day or two. The eulogy I gave at Sheri?s and Rachel?s funeral was quoted in the one or two newspapers that covered her funeral. But then it all faded entirely from the news. I had expected that. I had not really anticipated, though, the much more concrete, immediate experience of that same fading which greeted me as I walked through the building that morning on my way to my office. The people who knew me were all gentle to me as I met them in the corridors that first day back. But of course, in an enormous office like that, most of the people did not really know me. I was alone with my grief, happy to be back at work but at the same time lonely in my sorrow. As I stood at the window, though, I felt how right that was. It was not only inevitable but right that something so devastating in my life would not really have a lasting effect on the lives of everyone else. That feeling had another facet as well. The fading made it starkly clear that it was only in my heart, in my memory, in my feelings that the reality of the particular person I had loved could exist and by existing mark what had been so utterly destroyed in her death. It is very difficult to express that moment accurately. The passing time has blurred the outlines of the experience. But even so it feels as clear to me now as it did then. What seems impossible is to express the uniqueness of what I felt. That shows the limits of my abilities as a writer, I suppose, but I think it also reflects something about the nature of writing, even the nature of words and language. Words can only express something shared. By expressing something shared, something common, they may invite their recipient to attend to something which is unique and not shared, but if it really is something unique and not shared, then it cannot be the unique, unshared thing the writer was inviting attention to. Perhaps the experience of having experiences that cannot be shared may be something we have in common. Standing at that window I felt quite clearly how real that inexpressible sense of her was, how real the loss of that inexpressible sense was in her death, and how it was only real because I was alive to experience it. The fading of the brutal events of her death from the awareness of those around me provided the background against which I could feel the reality of the inexpressible in its inexpressible concreteness without having to find a place for it in the world. Perhaps, then, to come back to Andreas?s musing, there is an important role that such social amnesia plays. It provides a backdrop against which each of us has the opportunity to recognize that which we each have and are and which is simultaneously completely vulnerable ? Sheri?s being was destroyed when she was murdered ? and eternally unique ? there is not now and can never be anyone else who is her. Without the silence which social amnesia provides, that inexpressibly unique being gets swept up into the inevitably superficial din of the public?s business. My best regards to one and all, Eric Dean Leaving Phoenix and moving to Washington DC Formerly in Chicago, IL --------------------------------- Tonight's top picks. What will you watch tonight? Preview the hottest shows on Yahoo! TV.