Jennifer Senior’s piece for The Atlantic strongly resonated with me. Perhaps it is the fact that I crossed Bobby’s path through Princeton. Or perhaps it is his sensibility that reminded me of people I am close to. Or myself. Senior did an amazing job following the thread of the story and reconstructing the narrative, two decades after they happened. The structure of the article was seamless without being obvious. It seemed to follow the structure of memories and how they come back to us. That is especially true of traumatic events, which is what this piece is following: the life and afterlife of trauma. Senior brings the different pieces of the puzzle together skillfully and allows herself to follow the story where it takes her. What started as an exploration of grief over time ended up touching on important themes such as the workings of conspiratorial thinking, family dynamics, survivors’ guilt and most surprisingly, how memory is reconstructed. The diary is so central to the article. The characters and their motivations come to life around this peculiar item which stands for Bobby, the non-presence at the heart of the piece. Everyone and everything is framed around that treasure, what it tells us and what it leaves as a secret. I also wanted to point out the photos and their contribution to the strength of the narrative. We are not only discovering the characters we are reading about but also diving into archives, such as Bobby’s last diary entry or his wallet. All of these elements build a repository of what is left behind after someone is lost and how those who stay behind attempt to recover or create meaning out of what remains. This is all captured through the quote “Life loves on” which is a creation – though not a fiction – built by those who stayed behind from remnants of what once was.

The theme of grief is also present in Nadja Drost’s “When can we really rest?” which makes an account of migrants going through the Darién Gap. Compared to Dickerson’s “Seventy Miles in Hell”, Drost maintains this narration of horror, death and danger which by all accounts are part of the Darién’s reality. However, I really appreciated the humanization of every character in that story, including the smugglers – a term that was used interchangeably with guides – the drug traffickers and the refugees themselves. Drost’s account is comparatively a more neutral description of the scenes in the region that brings together the diversity of people that makes up the landscape – drug traffickers, the indigenous community, guides and migrants themselves.

A common thread with Senior’s piece is the theme of grief. Speaking of the father whose 9-year old daughter got carried away by a river and his response to this traumatic event, Drost writes: “ How would having his daughter’s remains help his family? He tried to explain what might appear to some as heartless: For his family’s sake, he had to find a way to outlast what had happened. Mourning had no place on this journey.”

As Senior puts it, grief is “idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome.” These two texts show two versions of grief, both valuable and meaningful, and intimately different.