LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
funerals are anything but a natural end to life,” Kaleem writes.
“Instead, they assert, death and
mourning should be seen, smelled,
touched and experienced.”
We meet Alison and Doug
Kirk, a Nashville couple whose
9-year-old daughter Caroline
died after years of suffering from
Niemann-Pick, a terminal disease
that damages the brain, lungs
and nervous system. When Caroline died, her parents washed
her skin and hair in the bathtub
and dressed her in a white communion dress, and then placed
her body in her bedroom, near
her favorite stuffed animals and
books. Friends and family came
to visit, sitting in the bedroom’s
rocking chair, even stroking Caroline’s hair and face. After three
days, her parents lifted her body
into a simple pine box, and Caroline was buried in a bare country
cemetery outside Nashville, in
a ceremony with no formal religious overtones.
“We had taken care of Caroline
her whole life,” her mother said.
“Why would we give her to someone else once she died?”
Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan J.
HUFFINGTON
03.03.13
Reilly checks in on one of President Obama’s original campaign
promises: to close the Guantanamo Bay naval base and detention center in Cuba. “In the
dark halls of Abu Ghraib and
the detention cells
of Guantanamo, we
have compromised
When
our most precious
Caroline died,
values,” Obama said
her parents
in a 2007 speech.
washed her
Nearly six years
skin and hair
after Obama pledged
in the bathtub
to close it, Guantaand dressed
namo is still operather in a white
ing, with 166 people
communion
currently imprisoned and likely to
dress, and
remain there indefithen placed
nitely. Meanwhile,
her body in
the once-urgent
her bedroom.”
need to close Guantanamo has diminished as stories of detainee
abuse have faded, eclipsed by
new concerns, like drones. As
Reilly puts it, “The truth is that
nobody is really in a hurry to close Guantanamo.”
ARIANNA