Adjusting to death, like everything else associated with death, has its own timetable, unique to each of us. Every person takes a different amount of time to assimilate death and incorporate loss into life. Sometimes families can easily deal with these differences. Other times they can�t. If, in a sense, New York City is one big family, it appears New York has run into these realities.

Differential assimilation causes more friction when confronting more troubling deaths. The death of the elderly after lingering illnesses may cause one person or another within a family particular problems but it usually allows others within the family enough peace to be accommodating. The sudden deaths of the young�whether by illness, suicide, murder, or accident�leave fewer members functioning well enough to negotiate the differences. With those deaths, my experience has been that horrendous things can happen at the funerals and worse things can happen afterward. And when it is the grieving versus the grieving who is to say who holds the trump card?

Every family seems to have high ritual people and low ritual people. Within our larger culture, eulogies, certain prayers, and (usually) burial comfort the high ritual people. Low ritual people find all this fuss uncomfortable. Forget a highly structured funeral. Many of them crave a simple memorial service where people speak as the spirit moves them. They are the scatterers of ashes in quiet places.

Every family also has some people who cope by handling the mundane details and those who believe that the first group lacks feeling. Robert Frost, in his poem �Home Burial� captured the frictions these differences create about as well as anyone I�ve ever seen. In the poem, the wife cannot forgive the husband for managing to bury their baby. She believes that anyone who was cold enough to bury the child cannot truly mourn the child. Her inability to accept the differences allows a tragedy to pull the family apart.

While I tend toward high ritual, I also am the type of person who could and would dig the baby�s grave. Intrinsically, the decision not to risk lives to find dead bodies is a practical one and feels right to me. I understand that there comes a time when you move the heavy machinery into the World Trade Center ruins and say that we can no longer afford to search for bodies.

Yet I know enough of the ways of death to know, even without seeing yesterday�s demonstration, that many will see that as cold and uncaring. Many will feel that any such decision tramples on their feelings and their hopes. Some of them might be ready to make that decision eventually yet for others forever would not be long enough.

It�s relatively easy to appear a hero in the early stages of tragedy. The man (or woman) who can read the mood and respond with the definitive voice and direction will be a hero. We are entering the time when being a hero is almost impossible. I wish Mayor Guiliani luck. He�s going to need a lot of it.

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