China quake's horrors leave an imprint

Like most people, I move through life clinging to a few assumptions that give me a modest sense of control. That the floor and walls around me will hold. That my loved ones will die of old age. That my life has meaning.

Many of these comforts were blown apart over the last two weeks of covering the Sichuan earthquake, a staggering natural disaster that left more than 67,000 people dead. How do you absorb the random nature of death on such a scale, so many thousands of children buried alive in schools meant to nurture their energetic bodies and soaring spirits?

Friends sometimes question the sanity of being a journalist, and particularly a foreign correspondent. When everyone else is running away from danger, reporters head toward it. Shortly after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit May 12, this was the drill: racing to the airport, somehow managing to get a seat on a full plane, landing in Chongqing and driving all night to reach a school where 900 students were buried, all in time for deadline.

This quickly morphed into a blur of 19- to 21-hour days filled with blank stares, terrifying aftershocks and displaced people driven temporarily mad by despair.

In the rush, you didn't have a whole lot of time to think very deeply about what you were seeing. There was too much to do, too many editor demands, too many logistics problems. Somewhere on the flight down from Beijing to Chongqing, between the in-flight service and touchdown, the psychological flak jacket went on.

Around day three or four, though, you started thinking about the intrusion you represented as a foreigner asking deeply personal questions about love and loss of those coping with undreamed-of suffering.

On the road to Hanwang, a middle-aged man paced back and forth atop a mound of rubble watching a machine slowly tear away giant chunks of concrete from the pile. The object of everyone's attention and anguish was his wife of 24 years, buried in the remains of the house they'd built together. Hoping against hope that she was still alive, he'd been waiting three days by this time, some spent digging with his own hands.