In watching people die, I have come to better appreciate how much meaning people attach to a body and how death has a way of revealing our most elemental beliefs about what remains. I have talked to patients in their final moments, have shoved long needles into pulseless vessels, have held the hands of weeping mothers and wives and sons, have electrified bodies on hallway floors, have carried severed limbs and have watched blood and vomit and blood fly through the air during final resuscitation attempts. I have stayed in the room with these bodies after life has passed and have found this to be true: death is not always dignified.
However, this does not mean that a body can be divorced from meaning. It has been nearly a month since the Boston marathon bombings, and yet its bitter memory lingers in an unusually unsettling way. In remembering, we want to act in the right way, but how can we tell what that even means?
A desire for justice can easily become a thirst for vengeance. We are tempted to make exemptions to our own laws on civil liberties and justify a demand to judicate Dzokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant. We even foment controversy over the burial plot of the deceased bomber himself, to the point where a local police chief felt compelled to plead with and remind the public, “There is a need to do the right thing… We are not barbarians. We bury the dead.â€
And yet on the opposite end of the spectrum, a humanizing approach can seem equally disturbing. [Read more…] about Cheap Justice, Cheap Grace