When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

Bishop’s question forces the reader to look past the impersonal way tragedies are reported—numbers of dead, brief circumstances—and to imagine the hidden, intimate history behind each victim. By invoking “love and treasure and patience,” he emphasizes the long, cumulative investment parents make in a child’s life, an investment that is erased in an instant by catastrophe. The stark detail about bodies “no longer suitable for open caskets” confronts the physical reality of violent death and the additional cruelty it inflicts on survivors, who are denied even customary rituals of viewing and farewell. The quote functions as a moral prompt: cultivate empathy, resist abstraction, and recognize the human cost behind headlines.