We need to respect and respond to the individuality of people's responses to such a trauma, writes Marie Murray.
"They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed"
-William Johnson Cory
Wherever you are in Ireland today your thoughts must be at the graveside of five young girls. With deep respect for them, with all who mourn for them, most of us will be there in thought or prayer. We will be there again tomorrow when the last young person is laid to rest.
It is the nature of national disaster that it involves both public tragedy and private grief. There is always then, the ethical question whether to speak about it or remain silent, to write or recognise that words are inadequate. For it involves everyone while it particularly engulfs some. It is individual bereavement, family sorrow, community loss, national grief, international sympathy and state concern. This tragedy touches all and so we write to convey condolences and to make sense of the incomprehensible.
For what more bitter news could be brought to parents than to hear that their child is dead? The death of five schoolgirls in Monday's school bus accident is a disaster of immense proportions. It makes parental blood run cold and evokes our deepest and most profound sympathy. Young, accidental and untimely death is always an outrage. It frightens us, this fragility of existence: the thin thread by which even strong, exuberant and vivacious youth are attached to life.
Youth are our immortality. We should not outlive them. They should not die before us. It is not fair. The young should not be injured: they should not confront life's mysteries or the reality of their mortality at tender years. They should not be traumatised by images of disaster. The slow motion of life-altering moments should not be etched on youthful minds, nor should they see panic on parental faces, hear the sounds of sirens, witness death or bury their friends. If we, at a distance, we who have heard, read, watched the images on television, and turned the pages of our newspapers are shocked, disbelieving, angry and distressed, then what is the experience for those who were involved?
Life is lived on central assumptions: that tragedy happens to other people not to us and that there is logic, meaning and reason to what happens. But for the young people on the bus, their families, for the bus driver and the entire local community of which these schoolgoers were a part, tragedy happened to them and to each other. A moment in the making, it will take a long time to cope. Some memories will last forever. Some pain may always remain. Loving memories of their friends who died will never die.
Critical incident debriefing studies make us increasingly respectful of the individuality of people's responses to disasters: that counselling must be an invitation not an imposition, that it cannot counteract human suffering and pain but it can at least name and explain some of the psychological processes and recognisable responses that trauma contains.
Disasters are defined by type, duration, degree of personal impact, likelihood of repetition and control over reoccurrence. But in the immediate aftermath how do people respond? Parents may wish to remind themselves and their children that when the shock, disbelief and numbness abate they may feel overwhelmed for a while. They may re-experience the incident with vivid flashbacks, images or intrusive thoughts, ruminating each moment, each moment a memory.
The sight of a bus, sound of a car, a siren's wail or the smell of a tyre, having to travel the road on which the accident happened, or any transport of any kind, all have the potential to evoke or revive fear. There may be hypervigilance for danger because if "the accident" could happen then anything could happen. Some may talk of nothing else and some not wish to talk at all.
Being with friends is important for young people - consoling each other, taking turns to laugh and cry, checking out the normality of emotions as they witness or display them and learning that grief comes in waves that sometimes engulf before they abate and that living in "unreality" is part of grief's path.
Some may be afraid to leave the house. Because it was with a group the accident happened, some might avoid friends. Others may not wish to be alone. Adult availability is important. Afraid to speak for fear of upsetting their parents further, some may avoid discussion of the details. Parents may be afraid to hear what they have to say, to imagine what might have been and to think about what other parents now endure. All must remember that at this time nothing is "normal", that it is right that the community commits itself to the tasks of grief, to the consequences of the trauma and to their own process of consolation that will carry them through.
There is no logic or meaning as to why some children should have lived and others died, why some were critically injured, why some were trapped and others thrown free. Why did some people get the bus that usually would not have? Why did others stay at home that would otherwise have been there? Why did the decision on where to sit determine life or death? This is the triadic tragedy of tragedy: the trauma of these unanswerable questions, the surrealism of disbelief and the torture of irrational guilt. If only, if only, why, why, why? Those in the accident will learn, too young, these echoes of mourning, that grief is a gruesome, guilty business that takes energy and time.
But they will also learn the language of empathy, power of kindness, support of community and new depths of care. These young people may show this adult world the strength and courage of the young, how they occupy scared spaces and hold their friends who have died, special and sacred in their youthful hearts: Spás Naofa na nÓg, Croí Naofa na nÓg.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin