Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into my room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of Autumn, I think of someone with hands who does not want me to die.

He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.

Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.

How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life?

The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.

Now when his child falls and scrapes her knee, a loving father is certainly going to scoop her up in his arms, carry her into the house to treat the wound, and hold her close while she cries. That's what God does for us in our pain. But a wise father will also encourage his child to go back out and try it again, because that's the only way to learn to ride a bike.

Catastrophe is the time to run into God's arms, not away from them.

As Søren Kierkegaard says in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death (the sickness in question is despair): "Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed.

You cannot understand how intense depression and anxiety can be unless you have been there, and not every chemical imbalance signifies a demon. Sometimes we need to give people permission to take medication if they need it—which, by the way, is a huge no-no in many Christian circles.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.