Some of the letters have said that the loss of a friend can be as meaningful and heartbreaking as the loss of a spouse. While there are cases where this could be true, I don't think it could have been here. Aaron lived across the country--her daily life was not irrevocably changed by 9/11--the widow's was. She lost her daily companion, presumably *her* closest friend, the family's chief breadwinner *and* the father of her children--days after she discovered she was pregnant. While everybody needs to mourn, the fact is that a widow with a toddler and another on the way doesn't have the luxury of, say, binge-drinking and falling apart with grief. Children need to be fed, diapers changed, laundry done. And to do this on your own while pregnant, to raise children who will never know their father . . . the problems here go way beyond who feels worse or has the greater right to grief.

And, yes, you'd need friends who didn't fall apart--Aaron wasn't up to the task and, for that matter, didn't understand what the task was. She really didn't seem to get what her friend was up against and what she needed. For some people, it takes being a parent before you really get what that entails.

Meanwhile, maybe Aaron could donate her earnings from the article to a charity that helps widows and war orphans.

Tristin Aaron's article on the loss of her friend makes it sound as if she were a passive victim of the 9/11 tragedy instead of an active agent in the demise of a friendship. A quick Googling makes it clear that it wasn't that simple.

The Salon article is not the first time that Aaron, a publicist, has used the death of her friend's husband as a means of drawing attention to her grief. She did it here: http://www.doktorfrank.com/archives/002241.html in 2002 to explain her new neocon views and why she supported bombing Afghanistan.

Now, I have no idea how her friend felt about this, but if I were a widow with two small children whose husband had died in a tragic crash, I'd feel, well, that my "best friend" was trying to co-opt and exploit my life. That Aaron has done this twice--well, who needs friends like that?

Since Aaron seems to have little interest in protecting her "best" friend's privacy, it was easy to do a search on Haven. It is clear, she bonded with other 9/11 widows and while her views on bombing Afghanistan aren't stated, she is among the 9/11 widows who donated money to help widows in Afghanistan. Again, I have no idea what Haven thought, but maybe, given her own loss, she has too immediate an understanding of how terrible it is to lose one's husband and the father of one's children to be as pro-war as Tristin Aaron became. Perhaps she doesn't want other women to suffer as she has--even if they are on the "wrong side". I don't know and it doesn't seem to have occurred to Tristin Aaron to have found out.

But then, Aaron seems to rewrite facts to suit herself. Her version of 9/11's aftermath has her spending days sitting *inside* the house with family members, not locked out on the stoop. And, instead of hanging around indefinitely "After the funeral, I went home to California, convinced that my presence was no longer helping. Since then, I have called and written very frequently, and plan to return to Boston over the holidays. If you are wondering how they are doing, I can only say, they are surviving, even though, at times, they do not want to be."

I'm sure Aaron's pain is genuine, but next time she decides to write a personal essay, a little personal honesty would be nice.

I, too, was one of those kids designated as "gifted"--as was my mother as were my neices and nephews and so will, no doubt, be my daughter. And, yes, much of school did not interest me. Nonetheless, there's a kind of dissatisfied, petulant tone to many of these letters. It's clear that the writers consider the public school system failed them because it did not sufficiently adapt to them.

My own view of giftedness differs. Many of the kids defined as "gifted" are head-of-the-class bright. Teach them well, give them some extra-credit projects and encourage them to read. They'll do fine--provided that they're allowed to be second-best some of the time (we all are.)

With the extremely/profoundedly gifted, I think there are some different issues. A child who thinks that outside of the box will have a hard time fitting in and it really is hard to adapt the standard curriculum to her or him. However, having known some unhappy ex-prodigies, I don't think these kids should be pushed to the edge of their abilities. If anything, they need less pressure than a kid closer to the median--a very bright child is one who's extremely absorptive. In many ways, one of the best things that happened to me is that my abilities were somewhat ignored--I was left to read and think in peace. By the time anyone outside my family found out what I read and how I thought, I was well into my teens and beyond the hot-house child stage. As a result, I enjoy my mind--but many of my former hot-house friends don't.