My husband David and I have three children. I know when we had Cecilia first, we thought we could never manage it. Then, she came, and it was like we were finally whole. With Leo, and then Jeremiah, it was the same: how will we manage? But quickly, we were whole. Our family is a unit of five. Period.
So if you asked me how much my child is worth? Their life or their arm or leg? You can't ask me those questions. I can't go down that path, the cold calculation of death or destruction. If something happened to them, you could never make me whole again.
Yet, as a nation, that's exactly what we do in the wake of a tragedy: We put a price tag on misery. The man that those who lead us call when disaster strikes is Ken Feinberg, the compensation czar in charge of handling the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the money doled out after the BP oil spill, and the Virginia Tech shooting, among others.
Some highlights from our conversation:
I don't know what I would say to Ken if he showed up at my house with a check and said: "I'm sorry for your loss. Here, this won't bring your child back, but it will bring..."
What, exactly?
We have created a system of compensation that seems simultaneously fair and exceptionally unappealing. And the man who has led this effort - a cold accountant and a charming ethicist; jarring at times, hilarious at others is the only guy in the whole country who deals with this stuff. Feinberg believes the system is fundamentally flawed, and yet he goes on. And we accept it, because we don't know any other way to say what we already know to be true for those who have lost so much in a tragedy: There is no closure. There will never be closure.
Security Mom is a podcast hosted by Juliette Kayyem that aims to unpack how the strange and secretive world of national security works. Subscribe to the Security Mom podcast in iTunes.
