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By Root 1190 0

After a while she is presumed dead, but she shows up, not having been kidnapped, but having been seduced. She wants to come home, wants to go back to junior high school. These families get their little girl back, but in a whole new universe. I believe that the reason our news is as interested in lost girls as it is in geopolitics is because the news is doing the work of myth for us, and when we respond with public grief rituals—vigils and memorials—we are doing what the Greek women did. Let’s look at it from a more oblique angle. Imagine what would happen if once a year women met for a three-day reenactment of the drama of the lost child: maybe they take turns pretending to be Katie Couric while the “mother” tries to remain composed and say the words into the camera, My girl is gone, and hold up a photo. Don’t ham up the scene, just try to get through the script, then go hang photocopied signs on telephone poles. Then have a vigil. Then a memorial.

Then the girl comes back. Her story is awful, but she seems okay. No one has hit her; they just pushed her around and seduced her and scared her. Your baby is back; not a baby anymore, but back. Let’s say on the last night of this reenactment, the women partied. Each woman imagines a bed on the ground beside her, and into it she tucks in her imaginary girl, home again and safe. Each woman is then to drink and take whatever drugs she pleases, or none, and dance around that invisible bed, to go wild, scream with delight, fall on other women’s arms. Even if no misfortunes ever came down on you, wouldn’t this teach you something about how to mourn and maybe how to stop worrying? And wouldn’t it bring you together with your neighbors? I think some people would look forward to this holiday all year long. I think some people would find it a relief to try on tragedy, and then have lived through it. Always bracing against pain is too exhausting; we need to embrace it now and again. It would bring people together in an intense and scalding way. It would let the mysterious power of the crowd develop intensely, to the point of euphoria, and it would let us have a public private life.

We know the reason that the ancient Greeks gave for their mad festival: It kept civilization going, it made barren things bear fruit. In our culture, some women who cannot conceive adopt a baby, and within a year they find themselves pregnant. The Greeks said that they celebrated because it helped their fertility. I’m sure it did. The wild celebrating of Demeter went on for over a thousand years and was the most long-lived ritual of the ancient world. Nothing lasts that long if it doesn’t work. Enactment, doing, is more than you think. Thinking about being drunk, for instance, is different from getting drunk, and thinking about dancing until you are drenched is different from dancing until you are drenched. Letting go of your borders and boundaries and letting yourself be seen could relieve stress and increase fertility.

Imagine a mandatory, yearly festival where the focus is on babies. Such a festival could mean a lot to present-day men and women going through the experience of parenthood or its attempts. Even for women, our culture is blind to the strains of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, nursing, and weaning. The men who become fathers get yet less serious attention, though the experience hits them extremely hard, too. Want to know the leading cause of death of pregnant women in America today? Murder. The expectant dad kills her. That’s a lot of tension. The ancient Greeks acted out this level of crisis for a short intense time instead of worrying a little bit every day.

Of course, all this attention to the loss of children was not just fear of parenthood. In ancient Greece, infant mortality was staggering. It is estimated that some 25 percent of all babies died before the age of one, and another 25 percent died by the age of ten.7 Much evidence suggests that people loved their children then as intensely as they did in any other century. They just had a different range of realistic expectations for