Beyond tsunami’s numbing numbers

The first news of the Asian earthquake and tsunami was gripping. Then the details of death and destruction were stunning. Hardest to bear, perhaps, were the stories and images of people – so many of them children – as they tried to flee the overwhelming wave of water.

Finally, the numbers marched through the black news headlines, the escalating numbers of the dead: 12,000 … 25,000 … 40,000 … 70,000 … 100,000 … 150,000…

For many of us, the numbers have become numbing. The White House called them “beyond comprehension.”

But we have to try to comprehend the magnitude of the deaths and the suffering. Otherwise the stark numbers can turn off parts of our minds and hearts, leading to masks of indifference or escapes into denial.

The brutal leader of the old Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, had a cynical understanding of such psychological avoidance. “One death,” he said, “is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

Why should we seek to break through the numbing numbers and desensitizing statistics to embrace the pain of the tsunami’s impact?

The answer is simple and difficult: to keep our sense of humanity alive.

How? I asked friends and neighbors, and their answers were varied and touching.

. Many spoke of prayer for the souls of those killed and the recovery of the survivors. One wise and imaginative man said that he was praying not just for but with the suffering people of the devastated regions, visualizing himself sitting with them in the rubble.

. Many have kept their hearts open through generous donations to relief organizations, or they pay avid and hopeful attention to the expanding efforts to provide food, clean water, medicine and shelter to people on the battered shores.

. Some said that they identified with the victims and the suffering survivors of the tsunami by remembering – painfully – their own experiences of observing a drowned body on a beach or barely coming up for air themselves after being tumbled by a rogue wave.

. One woman reported that the massive tragedy in Asia prompted her to reflect generally on the frailty of life and, tearfully, on the deaths of “too damn many” beloved persons – her father killed in Vietnam, other relatives and friends who died in accidents, a fiance lost at sea when his boat sank.

. The majority of those who talked with me focused on a single scene of death or grief on the Asian coasts. That was their way of remaining aware of the human dimensions beyond the numbers. The scenes carved into their consciousness were graphically and poignantly specific. Just a few of them are more than enough:

A father, nothing but absolute sorrow covering his face, holds the water-withered hand of his dead, 8-year-old son.

Another survivor who lost his entire family cannot speak to the television crew, his face is devoid of any expression, and his open but utterly empty eyes gaze at nothing.

The grieving mothers seem about to disintegrate in mind and body from their torment as they touch the sand-encrusted corpses of their children.

Row after row of victims in photographs taken in makeshift morgues are examined by survivors trying and dreading to identify lost loved ones.

A girl slumps against the splintered wood where her house once stood and from which her parents, brothers and sisters all were carried away.

Four children and a man who had been frolicking in the surf desperately try to run out of hip-deep water as the immense wave is about to descend on them – and on a woman moving toward one child.

And the scene which stays with me most sharply: A group of children, curious about the receding water, run down to the exposed area and joyfully pick up flopping fish for dinner, moments before the tsunami kills them.

Such focusing on the human loss should not become too prolonged. At whatever sensible point we can reach after a sharing of grief, our attention must turn to the precious gifts of our lives, with renewed appreciation and love for those most deeply dear to us.

Winthrop Griffith, an independent writer and author who lives in Owl’s Head, often reported on floods, earthquakes and other disasters as a journalist in northern California.