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A few months ago, at breakfast, my son pointed to page one in the daily paper and asked "is he hurt?" It was an AP photo from Iraq showing a car bombing, a man slumped over, dead. I lied and said he'd had an accident.

"The ambulance will be there soon," I said. My son was visibly relieved.

In the old days, newspapers policed themselves on the matter of corpses. Most simply didn't show them, the same way they didn't use the F word repeatedly as an adjective. But things change. I saw my first corpse in the local paper about 10 years ago, someone who'd died in a boating accident. Today, it's not at all uncommon. And my firetruck-loving son--who's got a built-in radar for emergency situations--always notices.

Last summer, he found some papers from September 12, 2001, and came running to ask what happened. "Bad guys," I said. He seemed to get it. These were burning buildings, after all. Not people. Recently, he found another front page and wanted to understand what those men were doing. They were Iraqis mourning, wailing painfully over the corpses right there in front of them, bodies half wrapped in white cotton, laying on a street curb.

Journalism rule no. 27: Don't make readers wince at the storytelling itself. Stories--the very real things that happen in this world-- may make readers wince and scream and cry and pass out because life can be a wretched, brutal, unmerciful thing, filled with as much misery and Guantanamo as mom's love and the Magic Kingdom. But storytelling, the device that conveys information, the photos and words, doesn't have to be cruel or flip or screaming in your face to get the point across. The story itself is enough.

My son didn't get it -- those bodies on the curb.

"Are they dead?" he asked.

"I think so," I said, thinking maybe I shouldn't shield him so much.

"But the ambulance will come and make them alive again," he said, decisively. It was not a question.

He believes so powerfully in the inevitability of rescue. That ambulances and firetrucks can--and will--fix everything. Even mortality. And it breaks my heart to know that one day, the world will reveal its truth: there's a terrible shortage of rescues and heroes.

One day he'll learn that. But not today.

*

Not so long ago, I began avoiding the daily paper, despite my obsession with Jumble and Sudoku. They'd sit for days on my snowy porch. Then I tossed them in a pile. Until one day I realized I was totally ignoring the news. I just wasn't doing it. And it wasn't just that my son chancing upon images of death and destruction was as inappropriate for a 5-year-old as stumbling across a Playboy or internet porn. It's that the news, right now, is just too much. The stories themselves hurt too much.

I called to unsubscribe a couple times but hung up out of total cognitive dissonance. How could a journalist unsubscribe? How could I leave a paper where I once, long long ago, was a reporter and editor? Well, it turns out that you just can. And finally, when the stack of unread papers reached 2 feet, I realized my indecision was making a mess, probably killing a whole aspen tree or something, and so I called, and I didn't hang up.

Now at breakfast we look at the morning sun or argue about how much cartoon-watching is healthy or look at the calendar and talk about all the things coming up--the birthday parties, vacations, picnics and parades.

It's liberating.

It's peaceful.

And life is beautiful, even if it's not. And that's okay. For now ...