The Role of Lawyers in Nuclear and Natural Disasters

This is the transcript of a presentation and an interview conducted in March 2012 as part of the Cornell East Asia Program symposium, “Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami One Year Later: How Can We Bring Closure to Crises?”

Ashina Yuki “What role should attorneys play in nuclear and natural disasters?”

I registered with the Shizuoka Bar Association in 2008. Prior to moving to Shizuoka, I worked as the inaugural director of the Soma Himawari (“Sunflower”) Foundation Law Office in Fukushima's Soma City. The Himawari Law Office (Himawari kikin houritsu jimusho: ひまわり基金法律事務所) is part of a program by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) to establish law offices in areas with attorney shortages (shihou kaso chiiki: 司法過疎地域– literally “attorney-depopulated area”). JFBA provides funding to their members to open law offices in these attorney-scarce areas. This fund is called the “Himawari Fund” (Himawari kikin: ひまわり基金) and is supported by the JFBA membership fee (JFBA started this program in 1999).

The East Japan Earthquake caused devastating damage to the entire Fukushima Prefecture, including the Pacific coast of the prefecture where Soma City and my previous law office are located.

Even though I lived in Soma only for a short while (for two and a half years), I'm very much attached to this city, and I really like it here. With another attorney, I opened an office in this “attorney-scarce area,” and we were the only attorneys in this area of approximately 12,000 residents. Therefore, the work kept me extremely busy, but, at the same time, I had lots of opportunities to find joy in serving others as an attorney.

While I was serving in Soma and becoming more psychologically attached to this place, I devoted myself to instituting the rule of law in this beloved city. The smiles and tears of the residents encouraged me to serve them, and some of my days were extremely busy. The number of attorneys in Soma increased since then, and there are currently eight attorneys serving the area. The disaster took place just when I was beginning to think that the local residents in Soma finally started recognizing what attorneys could do.

The basic premise of an attorney's work and the rule of law is that we live in the areas where we work. Our work is rooted in the livelihood of local residents. The Fukushima nuclear disaster, more than the tsunamis, broke this foundation. My two and a half years in Soma were also wiped away by the tsunami and now the radiation contamination from the nuclear power plant. The sorrow and anger within me are what drives me right now. If I don't do anything for Fukushima right now, then I would wonder why I even became an attorney.

The Characteristics of the Nuclear Disaster

3/11 was an unprecedented disaster consisting of the big earthquakes and the nuclear disaster. I think that the effect of this disaster has two distinctive characteristics: (1) the effect of this nuclear disaster is serious and covers a wide geographic area, and (2) this disaster has taken away the future of the local residents.

(1) Its wide geographic scope and serious effects

I would like to start with the damage from this nuclear disaster. Currently, there is an exclusion zone of a 12-mile (20 km) radius around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and nobody is allowed to enter this zone in principle. It is expected that nobody can live in this area for a few decades. The residents in this zone lost their social infrastructure and were literally “uprooted” from this zone. This means that they lost everything such as their land, house, job, school, and homeland.

Also, some of the residents who lived outside of the exclusion zone inevitably decided to move out for their children's health. It is estimated that approximately 100,000 residents have evacuated from Fukushima, and they are called the jisyu-hinansya (voluntary evacuees: 自主避難者). Even if they lived outside of the 18-mile (30 km) radius from the nuclear power plant, they were still near the plant. They worried about the unknown physical effects of the diffused radiation and so they evacuated to different areas to save the future of their children. In this sense, the label “volunteer evacuee” fails to explain their difficult reality.

At this time, many residents have evacuated from Fukushima. However, there is a serious gap between those who stayed in Fukushima for various reasons and those who evacuated. As a result, the kizuna (bond) among the local residents has been completely destroyed.

(2) The loss of local residents’ future

Another characteristic of this nuclear disaster was the loss of the future for local residents.

This nuclear disaster stalls any kind of recovery plan. What should they do after removing debris, restoring their lifelines, building houses using various kinds of public funding and recovery efforts, and restarting local businesses? Due to the radiation contamination and rumors, neither farmers nor fishermen can take any further action. The nuclear disaster is smashing any local hope which could have grown out of their hopeless desperation.

The victims are thinking about a future which is much further away than we can imagine. Do you know what the victims are saying? They say, “Had I known that this kind of hell was coming, I would have wished that the tsunami would take me away.” I became an attorney eight years ago, and I've never heard such a sad expression until now. We can't say anything back. This nuclear disaster easily crushes the strong spirit of a person who survived the devastating tsunami.

In the case of a nuclear disaster, the victims can get a certain amount of compensation. However, even if there were an infinite supply of financial resources, it would be impossible to fix this kind of damage. Several hundred thousand victims got irrevocable damages from this nuclear disaster (I would like to come back later to the problems with compensation claims for this nuclear disaster). As attorneys, we have to keep in mind that we are supporting those who lost “what they cannot buy or regain with money.”

Also, as I discuss the loss of the local residents’ future, I would like to mention that the number of children radically decreased from the Pacific coastal side of Fukushima Prefecture. The reason is very tangible. The children have been evacuated to avoid exposure to land with radioactive fallout. However, what kind of light do you think is out there in the land without children's smiles? If they do not grow up in Fukushima, do you think that they will have any psychological attachment to this homeland? Will they come back, or can they come back? What kind of future can you imagine for the land where children will not come back?

Furthermore, even after they escape from Fukushima, they may face discriminative treatment from thoughtless people. One of my attorney friends moved to Tokyo to protect his young children after the nuclear disaster, but he is hiding the fact that he is from Fukushima. Also, as far as I've heard, there have been cases in which evacuees changed their “Fukushima” license plates out of fear of vandalism, and in which their children were bullied because other children thought that the evacuees carried and disseminated radiation. Evacuees have been cut off from information, and they need legal support.

Role of Attorneys

This nuclear disaster has brought such devastation. Now, what role should attorneys play? I think we have to engage in the following two things: (1) we have to accomplish a comprehensive compensation system for the victims of this disaster, and (2) we have to get involved in the legislative process for a special recovery support act.

(1) Comprehensive compensation

It sounds easy when we translate this into a written format. However, we can get lost when we start working on this issue and hit a big wall.

There are more than several thousand victims from this nuclear disaster, and they are currently dispersed all over Japan. It is also not easy to legally sort them out because the nature of their damage varies victim by victim. Moreover, we still don't know when this disaster will stop causing further damage. The exclusion zone was also an attorney-scarce area (bengoshi kaso chiiki: 弁護士過疎地域) when my partner and I set up our publicly funded law office. The local residents do not have a strong consciousness of their legal rights; they are not familiar with an “attorney.” They don't voluntarily visit law offices, and attorneys have to actively reach out to them. However, we don't have enough attorneys on the ground.

At this moment, there are three options for victims seeking compensation: (1) fill out TEPCO's claim forms, (2) appeal to the ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) Center on Damage Compensation by the Nuclear Power Plant Incident, and (3) appeal to the courts. However, all three options have pros and cons, and there currently is no ideal option. With any of these options, I think that it is an attorney's long-term responsibility to fight for a system that provides the most comprehensive compensation for the victims and prepares a path for victims to easily move on with their lives.

(2) Involvement in the legislative process

Attorneys have to accept that one of the characteristics of this nuclear disaster is the fact that “money can't restore the damage.” Our role is to translate long-lasting support systems into laws such as various forms of recovery support systems, a medical and health monitoring system, a continuous information support system, a ban on unjustifiable discrimination, and proper management of a victims’ registry (these things are vulnerable to political games).

We need an unimaginably long duration of time to engage in these two roles. In this sense, what I think is really important is probably for us to always remember the victims and to constantly think about what we can do for them. Even if it is something small, there is a significant difference between “taking action” and “not taking any action.” Moreover, if we “continue” doing so, the value of our actions will increase as we make a long-term commitment.

Lastly, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) is proactively sending attorneys to Fukushima.

However, support should go not just to the affected areas. Because there are many victims dispersed all over Japan, there are many other opportunities for providing legal support, such as outreach to the victims living in your area.

Even if you are living far away from the victims, you can shorten the psychological distances between you and the victims by using your imagination. We can probably make helpful policies and laws for victims if we are creative. Now more than ever, people need the fortitude of attorneys who believe in the power of language and the power of logic.

Interview with Yuki Ashina, interviewed by Miyazaki Hirokazu, translated by Paul McQuade

Yuki Ashina, who contributed an essay to the February 2012 forum, is a lawyer currently based in Shizuoka City. Ashina was dispatched to a coastal region of Fukushima Prefecture (Hamadōri), an area with only two lawyers for a population of 120,000, under the Himawari Foundation system, previously established by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations as part of the Control Measures for Judicial Underpopulation and Maldistribution. She has experience working in a legal office established in Soma, a city in the same prefecture. Hamadōri is an area heavily damaged by the nuclear incident of March 2011, and Ashina, who for some time has been involved in the area in her capacity as a lawyer, has become involved in the issue of compensation following the nuclear incident in 2011 in cooperation with lawyers from around the country. Miyazaki met with Ashina in Tokyo in December 2013 to discuss her activities since the disaster.

Are you dealing with many cases like this in Shizuoka?

There are a few, yes. What they all have in common is that people are just trying to protect their families. Obviously, there are as many different circumstances as there are evacuees. There are people from inside the evacuations zone and from outside it. There are people originally living in Shizuoka, and others who moved there for work. If we take these cases as examples, though they all appear different, I think there's a lot of people who still want more out of life, who, even among those similarly affected by the incident, remain independent. And although it also involved a certain amount of luck, these are people who had the strength to get themselves somewhere with a lawyer. What I do each day, while it is sometimes hard, is usually with a sense that I can't abandon the people who have made it this far.

But what's more difficult than that is the fact that I'm aware that there are people out there whom I can't help. People who can't move, even though they want to, and when I thought about those people who can't make their voices heard in even the slightest, it breaks my heart. This isn't just the elderly, or victims of the disaster, but maybe members of the family, or people living in the area who are vulnerable, or the economically disadvantaged as well — they can't make their voices heard either. For example, there was a young mother who was taking care of her in-laws while also bringing up a young child, and she told me that she spent a long time agonizing over the fact that as a mother all she wanted to do was take her baby and run, but as you might expect, she was worried about what the neighbors would think, and when she thought about how she would be able to eat if she left with the baby and got divorced, she realized it was up to her to take care of everything.

This isn't the only example. There are clearly lots of people in different circumstances, and we have no choice but to pick from among them. But when it comes to those people I just mentioned, who are trying to make themselves heard but can't, you have to learn to strain your ears to hear them, and strain your heart to feel them, if you're going to pick up on them. Going back to what I just said, I personally cannot get on board with the idea that giving those people monetary compensation is somehow a resolution. The problem of how we are meant to respond to damage that can't be monetarily compensated is on my mind morning and night.

You aren't just insisting on work being done in a legal form, but on the need to offer support with the creation of a network which relies on the skills of various experts.

Not isolating people like this, who are vulnerable and voiceless, I think, is extremely important. One thing I learned when I was newly appointed to Soma is that there are limits to what a lawyer can do. As professionals, lawyers are only involved in in the legal portion of disputes. And their work is primarily concentrated on getting to the issue entangled in all the various threads of the dispute within a given timescale. But at present there are many things that, even if you untangle them from all the arguments around them, won't resolve the fundamental problems. Lawyers are involved for only a brief time, and in a small portion, of people's lives, and in a very small capacity, certainly not capable of solving everything.

For example, when I was in Soma, in problems frequently associated with debt, even if the currently existing debt was manageable, if you didn't find and fix the original reason for taking on that debt, then you just ended up back at square one. Though the problems associated with short-term loans seem as though they can be resolved with “debt adjustment” and “personal bankruptcy,” the fundamental problems that person is dealing with and the issues in their life can't necessarily be fully addressed by the efforts of a single lawyer.

In dealing with a lot of cases, what I've learned through a lot of suffering and a lot of hard battles, is that because a lawyer can't do everything, it's necessary to create networks of different people to work together hand in hand to combat the underlying pathology of a social problem. With the debt issues, at the start it was just me checking household accounts and giving advice on expense management, but it was soon too much to handle. At that time, I made up my mind to speak to the city office, and slowly the district welfare officer, the social welfare council, and so on, came on board. There were lots of individual discussions, like someone would say I'm worried about how this person is handling things, so I'd like to see their expense book once a month, or I think it'd be a good idea for people with alcohol and gambling problems to get periodic counseling, so I'd like to take them to a place that offers mental care. In doing things like this, which I would never have been able to do alone, we built a network, and with the right people in the right places giving us help, we could respond to individuals’ issues, and eventually, as we kept pushing ourselves to deal with each case, we gained experience dealing with larger societal problems. That was a huge turning point for me.

Based on this experience, since the nuclear incident I've been especially preoccupied with how we draw on the strength of people beyond the legal profession, and how we can keep gathering momentum. For example, when an NPO informs us that there is a relief event for victims of the disaster, then I ask them to make the event they're sponsoring the main focus instead. And I tell them that I'd like to take part too, in some small way, maybe in the form of a little slideshow about compensation, so that people can come for the show and have a consultation if they'd like. That way instead of making it into the kind of formal affair you normally have for these consultations, you have a place where the mothers can mingle with people the same age, and victims of the disaster can relax as well, and because we want the children that come with them to have as much fun as they can, I advise people to really focus on the things that are ancillary to the relief effort.

A new kind of litigation is emerging with the nuclear incident damages suits aiming at “full reparations."

That full reparations must be given out is something that I've also come to start saying, and as an idea, I believe that's absolutely right.

But the problem is, what constitutes “full reparations”? If we speak about it in technical, legal terms, the present system for damage compensation has at its base the idea that the price of something lost is monetarily compensated. For example, when someone is made paraplegic in a traffic accident and has to spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair, if they had been able walk and lead a normal life before, then they probably would have been able to receive this much income based on the average Japanese income and they've lost that money, so that income ends up being the figure for the compensation. Or, if they are paralyzed, even though they haven't incurred any excessive medical expenses, they probably will have extra medical expenses over the next ten years or so, and so they end up receiving those expenses as their compensation. Determining what was lost in a certain accident or case, in other words, determining the losses and converting that into a monetary value, is at the base of the legal discourse on compensation.

But with the nuclear incident it's hard to grasp exactly what's been lost, and thus what the ‘losses’ are. For example, if you were forced to lose a job or a house because you had to evacuate, then when you try and determine the losses it's not so difficult to calculate an amount for the compensation. And let's say you won't be able to work in the future precisely because of this incident. Then it becomes a matter of compensating for the money you would have normally earned. And if your family would have, under usual circumstances, kept on living in the house as was, you would end up receiving the price of the house as compensation.

The problem is whether what was lost is really just practical things you can easily grasp, like a house or a job. What the majority of people lost in this incident isn't something that the legal profession is used to converting into everyday cash, it is home itself. It was the old school that still held a piece of your heart after you graduated, it was your grandmother's house where you caught cicadas in the summer, it was the excitement you felt going fishing in the neighborhood stream, it was being able to lose yourself reminiscing with the classmates you only managed to meet once every few years, and even then, only when you came home. How much would that come to? Can you even put a price on something like that? And plus, what was lost is different for each person. There are people who just happened to be there for work, and people who had lived in the area their whole lives.

This problem of how one goes about turning this “loss of home,” which is different for everyone and hard to put a price on, into a monetary value, is a challenge that the legal profession has never directly dealt with. When you look further into the loss of home, you have to really look at how you convert damage that has stolen the hope people had, the futures they planned on.

It's a challenge trying to grasp these kinds of damage, but from the outset we have to also point out that until the present, “damage” has never been defined. Right now, even though we can't really feel exactly what was lost, after a few years have passed, we might be able to sense the scale of it. How we put into words, and how we make sense of, damage that isn't going away as time passes, but rather is being magnified, is an extraordinarily difficult task. Even if the full picture of the damage is impossible to grasp, anything we do after the survivors have passed is too late. It's a battle against time. And I can't speak to what kind of judgments will be passed down in the courts for those lawsuits that have just begun to take place up and down country.

In the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, several laws have been created for the purpose of victims’ relief, but as for laws that had to be penned with a view to offering relief to the victims of the nuclear incident, there is only the “Law on Special Measures concerning the Statute of Limitations on Claims for Compensation for Damage caused by Nuclear Accident” (Established December 4, 2013, brought into effect December 11). In principle there is a three-year period in which one can make a claim for compensation, beginning with the date of the damage itself or from the time at which one became of aware of it. However, under the special measures law, that period has now been extended to ten years.

This a law specifically tailored to the reality of a nuclear incident. It is a law put in place so that no one can say that requests for compensation are no longer valid because three years have already passed since the incident in 2011. The victims of this disaster are somewhat relieved to be told that they don't have to rush to file a claim, and that they can take their time to deal with it.

The problem of time and the statute of limitations is a serious issue. For example, for public health hazards, it's impossible for the statute to start until the cause of the damage is known.

For compensation claims for acts of tort, you have three years from the time you become aware of the existence of the damage or of the perpetrator. In lawsuits for pollution-related illness, there's come to be theoretical backing for the statute of limitations to proceed from when the perpetrator is brought to light. For victims of pollution-related illness, symptoms like pain and numbness are foremost and you only work out later whether the cause of the symptom is actually something like mercury or cadmium poisoning. Well, then you have to have an investigation into where the substances that are causing the symptoms entered the body, and eventually find out that they came from factory drainage or pollutants released into the atmosphere or something like that. We've come to deal with cases by first ascertaining the cause: if it's industrial culpability, you can pursue companies for that, and so the point when the statute of limitations starts to count down is shifted to that point in time; not when the symptoms appeared, but at the point when you've discovered a causal relation between the symptoms and commercial decisions.

What's different in this instance from the pollution-related illnesses that have occurred in the past is that everyone the world over knows that TEPCO caused a nuclear disaster in March 2011, and so, at first glance, the point at which the statute of limitations starts counting down seems clear. Because the fact that an accident occurred is public knowledge, when we think about whose fault it was that residents were forced to flee their homes and lose their houses now, it's 100% clear that it's because of the nuclear accident. So, if the person you can pursue for culpability and the cause of the on-going results is clear, then the danger is that people will ask, hasn't the three years since the nuclear incident been more than enough time for a claim to be made?

But the truth is, you can't just file a claim so easily. For example, if we think about the cases we've been talking about, when people think about rushing to file a claim and the value given for the house they lost is low and thus they are only getting a pittance in terms of compensation, then there's bound to be a lot of people hesitant to file. Plus, the majority of people have their own problems to deal with and don't know what to do. They're at an endless set of crossroads: do they stay as they are in the evacuation zone, or go back to their hometown? Is the house so damaged that it can't be rebuilt? Or maybe if they repair it, they could live in it again. Maybe they'll buy a new house at some point and live there. So, there are people who can't file a claim because they can't decide on what to list as damage for the compensation.

Here, because the loss isn't yet determined, the statute of limitations should, theoretically, proceed from the moment it is. This is perfectly fine, but, sure enough, even though the period in which the incident occurred and the entity you can claim as responsible for it is evident, because the figure for the losses can't be determined, when I'm asked whether we can go ahead with it, as a lawyer a part of me is still unsure about mustering the courage to put my seal of approval on it. I'm personally anxious about whether I'd be shot down the moment I try in earnest to rebut the idea that if TEPCO is the one responsible then the point at which we discovered the source of the losses was March 2011 with the simple argument: the losses weren't determined then. And in light of this fact, well, I think it was necessary to unilaterally extend the period for the statute of limitations. Because thinking that claims could be filed in the three years since the incident occurred was so dangerous, I think it's fair to say that the necessity for a special measures law was higher than with previous cases of pollution-related illness.

In order to establish this special measures law, lawyers from across the country had to stand up and be heard. The lobby movement was especially passionate, and a lot of signatures were collected. I think we can easily attribute this result to the fact that the damage caused by the incident is becoming more evident as we go on. The individual municipal bodies of Fukushima Prefecture banded together to help as well.

In the lawsuits that are currently taking place throughout Japan, for what kind of damage exactly is compensation being sought?

What they're asking for depends on the location and the suit, but in general, everyone seems to be trying to fundamentally change the way we think about claiming damages. One item on the agenda is compensation for pain and suffering, which they're also pursuing legally. To make what was lost legible to a court of law, you have to carefully make the case for life before the incident and use data to demonstrate the fact that after the incident a community has been left in pieces. A lawsuit is taking place right now, for example, where they're claiming thirty million yen per person in compensation for the pain and suffering of losing their hometown/home.

And then there's a lawsuit for the voluntary evacuees, as they're called. Those people who have received compensation amounting to about the same as consolation money, and who at the least have the same feelings as those people inside the evacuation zone, and because they're in the same situation, with the same resentments piling up, say that at the very least they want to be given the same amount for pain and suffering.

To repeat myself a bit, for experts and regular people to think beyond the nuclear incident itself and seriously think about just what was lost in it, including, naturally, those whom this disaster affected, is, I think, the starting point. It's just not right to try and make it all go away by saying that everything's fine because everyone can get some money. I feel like we're doing something hugely disrespectful, like we're just slapping the survivors in the face with wads of cash. They must feel like they're being told to put up with it because they'll get paid. But the people affected by this disaster want people to understand that they're not just out to get money. “What we lost wasn't money, so money in and of itself won't bring it back.” I want us, as legal experts, to pass these words on where we can. Dismissing the survivors as people to be pitied because of a stroke of bad luck just won't do. I want people to consider each and every one of them, as one of them.

I'm always wondering whether or not I can say something more about the hope that was lost. How I can possibly express the atmosphere of despair in the air, palpable every time I go to for a consultation in the temporary housing. For now, when people look at me, haunted, and say, “I don't know when I'm getting out of here. It might be that I have to stay here until I die. Is this a concentration camp?", the only thing I can do is write it down word for word; but what I'd really like to do is analyze what these words mean in more depth.

The idea that it's okay for me to give a set amount of money to these people, even though hundreds of thousands of people were affected by this disaster, or that it's okay for the nuclear plant to continue operations so long as this time it doesn't eventually cause another incident, is inexcusable. Leaving aside the fact that the risk of another disaster threatens underpopulated areas with huge amounts of damage, and that the installation of the power plant was a mindless political measure with the idea of simply discarding the regions themselves if an accident did occur, I don't think it makes any sense to just say that there won't be any more accidents, that it's safe now, without taking a long hard look at the problems and fundamental paradoxes of those measures. They're avoiding the reality of the situation. They're intent on burying their heads in the sand without taking a single lesson from this disaster.

In Japan, people are forgetting the earthquake and the nuclear disaster itself.

When I look at the survivors of the incident, the country, and the world which is forgetting it, it seems like those who've already taken so many hard knocks are beginning to think that they should forget it as well. Even among those people who have been desperately engaged in this issue, I feel like a sense of defeat, of powerlessness, has started to hang over them. It seems as though people are beginning to feel like they need to put an end to the issue, thinking that even if they say anything, it'll fall on deaf ears, that if they say something, it won't change anything, and even if they do say something all they're doing is getting themselves hurt, that the people around them think they're mad to keep going on about something that would be better soon forgotten about, that it was all just down to bad luck.

Naturally, I think everyone has this fierce anger building up inside them.

But that being said, then you have something like Abe's speech for the Tokyo's Olympic bid, and having to listen to what amounted to taking Fukushima off the table and declaring that Tokyo is all we should care about. During the deliberation of the Special Secrecy Law, the moment we opened the public hearing in Fukushima, those in attendance protested against the law on the basis that covering up the issue of the nuclear incident would be a catastrophe, and regardless of this, the lower house of the Diet voted on it the next day. The feeling that so far people's feelings have just been calmly trod all over with muddy shoes is, well, it's still ongoing, and this kind of thing itself is obviously something that's becoming unbearable for those who have been hurt and are trying to keep going. People are beginning to think that, no, they don't want to be a “victim” any longer. I'm concerned that they're starting to get caught up in the feeling that if no one's going to listen to them when they say how little something makes sense or that it's not going to work, then they might as well not bother speaking in the first place.

I think that because our job as lawyers is to get close to the victims and restore their happiness, we have to encourage people to be strong and make their voices heard. I think we have to push for the voices of those affected by the disaster to be at the fore as we go about changing history, because hearing directly from them is so extremely important. I believe it's vital that we not be deterred from saying that there is a history of people who came before, who fought hard against so much in the past, and who made their voices heard in order to get what they wanted.

Whenever I have the chance to talk to law students, I always tell them, “It's a lawyer's job to give people hope in the depths of despair.” I truly believe that right now is a crucial period for us. The truth is, where the victims are right now is the depths of despair. I believe we have a responsibility to keep telling people that we want to help them with all we have, to tell them to cry themselves hoarse, that it's still possible, even as they're sinking down into this mire of grief, to lift themselves up and out of it.

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