Under a manipulative dictatorship, decent people talk themselves into accepting mass killing. They say good men are doing terrible things. They compare the killing to a familiar household practice, such as cleansing the body with herbs. They even name their newborns after the man giving the orders. Groupthink makes slaughter sound like ordinary tidying.
Workers who cross a border to do back-breaking harvest labor and send money home can be treated as disposable by the country that depends on them. In the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands may have been killed. Afterward the killers' government offered roughly fifty cents in compensation for each death.
When people can build and keep nothing else, they hold on to the stories they dream. Repeated dreams of a loss can work like a protective charm, and they preserve the one story that is wholly the dreamer's own. Grief kept this way becomes something a person carries on purpose, not only something that happens to them.
One way to endure catastrophe is to stop searching for fate or meaning in it and simply keep moving forward. Dignity lies in the struggle to cope and go on, even when life feels like a strange gift.
A border river divides more than two countries: it splits the living from the dead and leaves the people who belong to both sides in a half-life between them. At such dividing lines, the stories that remain are stories of loss.