My little sister died not quite 46 years ago, killed in a car accident at the age of 20. Early one winter morning, she and her new husband set out to visit my parents, even as a sudden ice storm rendered the roads around Atlanta treacherous. Where their side road crossed the main highway, a slick patch sent them sliding into the middle of the intersection. An oncoming car, larger and traveling too fast for the conditions, smashed into the passenger side door of their car, driving it into a ditch, riding up and over the roof of the smaller car, crushing my sister and severely injuring her husband.

One searches for small blessings after something like this. As a family, we found solace knowing that she died instantly. We joined with her husband’s family in praying for his survival, passionately willing his eyes to open as we took turns at his bedside. This was far from a sure thing, the doctors told us. It became an exercise in endurance as he lay for many weeks in a coma, only to awaken with profound amnesia and years of struggle to rebuild a life shattered in a single instant.

For the family members, the shared bedside vigil gave at least some small meaning in the midst of heartbreak, something to fill the overwhelming emptiness that had invaded our lives. Willing his survival, praying and hoping, pretending that a fluttered eyelid or a spasmodic hand movement promised his awakening — these things mattered in ways that, looking back over the distance of decades, I can scarcely recapture.

In the midst of shared hope, the nights grew long with painful reminders, bitter ironies pressing in on our emotions at every turn. My sister had only been married for a few weeks — the leftover wedding cake stared back whenever we opened my parents’ refrigerator. And while we were assured that she’d died instantly, she was actually only pronounced dead in the emergency room of the nearest hospital — the very same hospital where she’d been born.

Closure? I’m not sure that any of us ever found it. Life went on, its daily demands insistent. This, we came to understand, was a kind of blessing. Sometimes in the midst of death, it’s good to be overwhelmed by life itself, by the little joys and big crises that push grief into the dark hours when sleep won’t come. I don’t know how my parents made it surrounded in their home by reminders of her. They bore this with a quiet dignity, but their sorrow lurked beneath the surface for the rest of their lives.

This past year, my little sister would’ve turned 65. Increasingly with the passage of years, I find myself wondering what her life might have been like had she lived. She was warm-hearted and outrageously talented. I suspect he might have accomplished a great deal with her life. I also wonder at the nieces and nephews I might have had, and not just the children. My older sister is also my great friend, and has been the whole of my life. What might I have gained in friendship over a life with the other sister, the one who died so young?

One of the cruelties of my little sister’s death was its irredeemable banality — a traffic accident on an icy road. In the year of her death, 36,398 others died in traffic accidents. Even in the little town where I grew up, one came to expect at least one such fatality per year. One sometimes began the school year wondering who would be gone by year’s end, for my high school years witnessed the traffic death of a schoolmate almost every year. One searches for a meaning that sheer statistical cruelty denies — after all, since the dawn of the automobile era, nearly four million people have been killed in automobile accidents.

One can craft meaning out of such things as the steady improvement in automobile safety, much of it inspired by our appalling history of traffic deaths, but it’s hard to translate this into genuine solace that a family can cling to. It’s been decades since I’ve returned to the scene of my sister’s death, and I’m told that the intersection now has a traffic light, but that scarcely fills the hole left in our family.

But this is an essay about death and families, not traffic safety. I’ve written more than once recently about other needless deaths, deaths not simply needless, but vile in their cruelty. Iryna, Logan, Bethany, Sarah — these are just the ones of whom I’ve written, young women murdered by men who should never have been out on the street, victims not simply of their killers, but of our “progressive” elites’ hopelessly misguided concepts of social justice.

The list is actually much longer — one could go on, name after heartbreakingly unfamiliar name. One can find their names if one looks hard enough, but even with such notable cases as Laken Riley, one has to look very hard — her killer, after all, belonged to one of the Left’s favored classes. One has to look beyond the legacy media narrative, wherein the wrong kind of victims are memory-holed in favor of the left’s favored victim du jour.

Sometimes it goes beyond narrative indifference, all the way to active and deliberate erasure. One thinks of how flyers depicting young women raped and murdered during the Oct. 7 pogrom were ripped down and trampled on by Hamas sympathizers on U.S. college campuses. Or the systematic and insistent depiction of the Gaza conflict as a genocide inflicted by Israel upon innocent Palestinians. One struggles to identify the most egregious actors, although the BBC and Al Jazeera certainly come to mind — but they have their rivals across the U.S. media landscape.

These inversions of the truth are bad enough for society as a whole, but they are unconscionably brutal when it comes to the families of the true victims. Worse, what the media ignores or treats with veiled contempt, the internet magnifies into sadistic hatred. Sarah Beckstrom, for example, didn’t deserve the vitriol directed her way on social media simply by virtue of having been assigned to patrol the streets of D.C. with her National Guard unit.

“Hate has no home,” however, apparently was suspended in Sarah Beckstrom’s case — the wrong kind of victim, you see. For the Left, hopelessly enthralled by the victimhood narrative, controlling the treatment of victims has become an imperative. Only potential left-wing martyrs need apply. Others need to be torn down, their deaths stripped of anything resembling a positive meaning.

This matters, if not for the dead than for those loved ones left behind. Long ago, mankind learned that death is made more bearable for the living when invested with at least some semblance of an uplifting message. One need not indulge in notions of “sweetness,” the dulce et decorum est of dying for one’s country — the death of young soldiers is never “sweet.” But it can be invested with something beyond the randomness of an automobile accident, or a murder perpetrated by a mentally deficient drug addict. It can give families something to cling to, something to fill at least partially the space in empty hearts.

One should resist over-generalizing the workings of solace. To paraphrase Tolstoy, “while all happy families resemble one another, each grieving family grieves in its own way.” But I’ve known many grieving families, above all my own, and I truly believe that death’s meaning matters, and that a special kind of cruelty follows from an absence of meaning. The emotional imperative within a grieving family is absolute.

Herein, perhaps, lies yet one more of death’s lessons for the living. With “wars and rumors of wars” everywhere on the horizon, we must remember that the most important single measure of a nation’s military capability is neither technical superiority nor tactical skill. Amidst the marvels of modern warfare, it’s sometimes easy to forget that soldiering, at its simplest, is all about death and dying, whether suffered or inflicted.

The Ukraine war has offered many lessons, but the fact that it continues reflects nothing so much as the willingness of Ukrainians to go on fighting — and, when necessary, dying, to preserve their freedom. We often read of wargames involving a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and, with a crisis point looming in 2027, it’s wise for our generals and admirals to ponder the range of scenarios. But the most important question defies strategic or tactical analysis — we simply cannot know if our country will accept the casualties such a war would entail.

The same is true of virtually any other potential conflict on the horizon. Taking Nicolas Maduro was measured as a success not only because he was taken into custody, but also because this was accomplished without the loss of a single American life. This also might be said of the bombing that crippled Iran’s nuclear program. Great gains, in both instances, important geopolitical victories.

But would we view them differently if a B-2 bomber had gone down, or if a dozen Delta Force operators had died in a firefight? How much meaning do we now require as a nation? A Pearl Harbor, or a 9/11. Those who would commit this country to war must keep the question of purpose, of meaning, of existential need, clearly at the forefront of their thinking. The same might be said of those who increasingly traffic in the language of “civil war,” without pause to reflect on what this might truly entail.

Reflecting on what she called “The Republic of Suffering,” historian Drew Gilpin Faust concluded that the blood-soaked legacy of our Civil War — some 600,000 dead, the equivalent of more than six million casualties in today’s population — created a profound need, a national imperative, to find a meaning within a slaughter that touched virtually every family. This need shaped not one, but several generations, and it particularly required the commitment of veterans willing to embrace each other across the vast chasm of wartime hatred.

Thinking about death is so deeply uncomfortable that modern Americans now try to avoid it altogether. What death means for the dead themselves is a matter for theology or philosophy and beyond the ken of this essay. The meaning for families is a big enough topic for now. As I write these words, however, half the country is in the grip of a massive snow and ice event, and, as I look out my window, the street past our house is glazed with ice. Forty-six years ago, I lost forever the ability to look with simple joy at the whiteness of a winter wonderland.

I still yearn for a meaning that I’ll never find in this life, and I pray that every family’s loss may be accompanied by at least some of the comfort that even the simplest shred of meaning can provide.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Time to Stand With the People of Iran

The New York Times Keeps Getting It Wrong on Nigeria

Arresting Maduro: Not a ‘Green Light’ to Xi or Putin

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His latest novel, The Zebras from Minsk, is the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.