The saddest stories ever : Aleksandar Hemon and others on mortality

The saddest story you'll ever read - not exactly a story, an essay actually - is Aleksandar Hemon's terrifying and beautiful memoir, The Aquarium, in the current New Yorker - about the tragic illness (a rare form of brain cancer) that strikes his 9-month-old daughter. (Spoiler alert here) I've really admired Hemon's fiction, which expertly captures the thoughts and struggles of a European immigrant trying to learn the American culture and build a life - probably characters much like Hemon himself. This essay surpasses everything else he has written and brings him to new, frightening territory. As he notes, there is no way to justify or explain the death of a child, nothing can console and nothing can make the family the same ever again - though wounds do heal, they leave scars. His essay will obviously be compared with Lorrie Moore's famous story The Only People Here are People Like Us (?), and maybe also with two recent essays or stories that appeared in the NYer, Joyce Carol Oates's account of her husband's death and Francisco Goldman's of his young wife's - each of these four about the mysteries of the medical profession and about the cruelty of fate. Hemon's is particularly striking because of his amazing observations; one of the questions is: Why would someone write these stories? And he takes on this question and explores how language makes us whole and makes us human - how stories enable us to imagine the lives of others and thus know what it is to live a life. To all of these fine writers: you have touched the lives of many readers, and your sorrow has moved us. May you continue to grow, to recover, and to write, as you face another day.