The filmmakers showed great restraint. Things were not exploitive; they backed off, removed the camera when someone was so overcome with grief that s/he could not speak.

The graves in Section 60 weathered the four seasons during the course of the documentary, and in a scene that broke my heart, a mother arrived on a December day to ask her son if "he was cold down there." Then she took off her coat and laid it over the space in front of his grave so that he might stay a little warmer.

I went looking for someone who might have posted YouTube footage of the documentary: n'existe pas. But then I found this: Kelsie, sitting in Section 60, writing to John McCain. She reminded me of many of the little girls who came to see their daddies on their birthdays or to wish them Merry Christmas at their gravesites, so I've chosen to attach the video to this piece.

In my own act of hubris, below I've attached a piece that I wrote shortly after the 1700th soldier had been killed. It had been sparked by a visit to an abandoned pioneer graveyard, where I found this epitaph:

Elijah Nathan
Feb 12 1827  1 yr 10 mo 24 days
Elijah Goodwin
Jan 4 1828  2 mos

So fades the lovely blooming flower
Frail smiling solace of an hourSo soon our transient comforts fly
And pleasure only blooms to die

Sons of Nathan and Rachell Hall

I've come here again to sit with the dead. In the Finger Lakes, graveyards are treasure troves of material for the writer. In a cemetery a few miles from home, there's a crypt containing one of the victims of the Titanic and an entire section where all the epitaphs are in Italian and tell immigrant tales of those who were nata on one continent and morta an ocean away. As a writer, I have journeyed many times to suck the bones of the dead, to attempt to hear long-silenced voices whose stories are summed up in the few words on their burial markers.

Today, however, is not a day for stories. It is, instead, my attempt to glean perspective from these burial fields. This tiny abandoned graveyard where I sit comprises a couple dozen stones, yet there are far too many markers for the very young. So many babies, so many children. Families that buried several children, lost to pertussis, smallpox, pneumonia, measles, scarlet fever, influenza, polio. Too many young women who died in childbirth.

I am here on an early August day. It has been one of the hottest summers on record—skies white with tension, sultry, unwilling to release a single drop of rain despite the migraine-producing levels of humidity. There is a cacophony around me. Not from the dead, of course. But the cicadas and the crickets vibrate the air with their calls, and I feel vaguely sick from the noise and the heat. And yet, I sit.

As I sit, I'm aware that somewhere in America, a family is burying a child killed in Iraq. Families have done it over seventeen hundred times in the past 29 months; privately, quietly, alone, their Commander-in-Chief no longer notable for his absence: being an official mourner is not in his job description. But across the country, there are others whose services are called upon with increasing frequency: funeral directors, gravediggers, and those who carve stories onto headstones.

What comfort do these families find as they bury their dead? I'm sure that for some, an abstract idea--that this child died for his or her country in service to a greater cause--will offer some solace. For others, a faith in an afterlife will soothe their souls. But for many, a cruel truth will emerge: death is. It simply is. And there is no ease there. For those who are aware that we are fighting an ill-conceived war-a  deliberate mistake-what possible comfort can be found at the moment that a child's coffin is lowered into the ground?

My daughters are not old enough to be called into the armed services, so, for now, my loved ones are safe. But that fact is irrelevant, because I am a piece of the main. These soldiers' deaths diminish me. They diminish all of us. I want to believe that George W. Bush knows that they diminish him, but as each day passes, and he doesn't convey even the simplest expression of sorrow for what these deaths entail, I fear that we are led by a man who loves his God, but cares not for the rest of us. Who has lost touch with his own humanity in pursuit of a make-believe role as leader of the free world.

 In the case of the two Elijahs, it is likely that the second Elijah was conceived in grief, in hopes of a lost son being reborn in the autumn. But life was cruel and stole the comfort Rachell and Nathan had made. The children who were conceived after the grief of Viet Nam are now dying in Iraq. There is no comfort there, either. And I fear that the children conceived now, as couples affected by death in Iraq seek solace in each other's arms, that those children will someday be sacrificed in another useless war. We have eradicated many childhood diseases, but not yet the diseases of our souls.

My pilgrimage to the graveyard is an act of solidarity with the families of the dead. I cannot make this president stop his ill-fated crusade. But I can bear witness, acknowledge my humanity, weep for the children of us all.