FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:

We often debate the differences between individual death and mass death. People say there is more sorrow involved in mourning the end of a loved one’s life, than in mourning the tragic annihilation of hundreds or thousands or millions of victims whose identities are unknown to us. I’m not sure that’s true. I have viewed the death in action of a son and also been forced to consider individual deaths and mass deaths that were all part of the same insidious event in history. It seems to me all the deaths were intricately connected to my sorrow in ways that I could never explain. The tangled, subdued sorrow over the multiple deaths of some mass disaster is, I believe, no less intense, no less meaningful, no less important, than the more dramatic outward show of grief for a person who has had the considerable misfortune to die alone.