Grief

Annie Le, whose body was found on the day she planned to wed, was mourned Monday by family members and friends from her hometown in the scenic Sierra Nevada foothills as smart and vibrant, kind and funny. The Yale University graduate student of Vietnamese heritage grew up in a remote, hilly area off a twisting, one-lane gravel road with an aunt and uncle she regarded as parents. Her brother remembered her on Facebook as someone who "left this world doing what she loved." "She may be small, but she be fierce," Chris Le wrote of his 24-year-old sister, who was pursuing a degree in pharmacology.

In a fit of creativity, Nathan Holsey stayed up all night painting a 24-by-48 acrylic portrait of Michael Jackson, singing with a microphone in his hand. Like other heartsick fans of the pop star, he couldn't bear to show up empty-handed when he made his pilgrimage to the Jackson family's Encino home on Friday.

A 200-member choir sang "Man in the Mirror" in Culver City. Musicians on the red carpet at the BET Awards in South Los Angeles spoke of their admiration for Michael Jackson. And dozens of fans continued to brave the heat on Sunday to pay tribute to the music icon at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and outside the Jackson family compound in Encino. "I grew up with his music," said Nancy Bingham, 25, of Glendale, who was among those at the scene in Encino.

Late at night, when the sky seems ominous and Fabiola Saavedra is curled up in bed lost in the past, her head fills with images of frantic searches down dark alleys, fliers posted in store windows and Polaroids of a lifeless face. By morning, the ghosts are gone and Fabiola, 32, wakes up, kisses her husband and drives her two children to school. She heads to her job as a case manager at a senior citizens' care center, where she greets clients and laughs loud and smiles big and makes lunch plans.

Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell is in Texas now. Army Chaplain Henry A. Haynes is in South Carolina. Eight years ago today, they were inside the Pentagon at 9:39 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 77 hit its mark. The world tends to give its fullest attention to anniversaries that end in zero or five -- not eight. There will be bagpipes and drums in New York. The president will lay a wreath at the Pentagon. Most of the nation will take a collective pause and move on. But for those like Birdwell and Haynes, directly touched by the terrorist attacks on Sept.

In the prologue to "Nothing Was the Same," Kay Redfield Jamison writes, "It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have." Jamison should know. A professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, she has written four books on brain chemistry, among them the critically acclaimed memoir "An Unquiet Mind," which movingly detailed her own struggle with manic depression.

At first glance "Lake Tahoe," the second feature by the 39-year-old Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke, looks very much like your standard minimalist import. Laconic characters, a fixed camera and unhurried rhythms amount these days to a lingua franca for international art film. It's a style that descends from such titans as Yasujir{omacronl} Ozu and Michelangelo Antonioni and that can now be seen in movies from every part of the world, not least those striving to capture the modern condition of estrangement and dislocation.

Sixteen years. Not long enough. Not long enough for Melody Ross to get her driver's license. Nor to maneuver the perils and promise of high school, much less college. Not long enough to figure out where life might take her. Nor actually to live it. She was gunned down on a Long Beach street, in front of her beloved Wilson High School, when the air was still suffused with the frolic of the hauntingly named homecoming game. An alleged gang member fired into a crowd of hundreds.

On this Sunday more than any other, Shemaka Hairston needed to pray. She survived last week's harrowing rampage at this base, in which 13 people died and dozens were wounded. A few feet from where she crouched under a desk, a soldier was shot and killed. Hairston, 29, applied pressure to a co-worker's wounds as he repeatedly recited the Lord's Prayer. After he was airlifted to a hospital, she broke down and cried. So she and another co-worker, Joi Swan, 48, went to an early service Sunday in nearby Killeen, Texas, as the nation struggled to make sense of the carnage.