*Class is in Session

Okay, let's tackle the hard part first. I have to kinda explain what trauma theory is, and, crucially, why I'm using it.
Ahem.
Trauma theory (in my words) tends to deal with large-scale human suffering and death. It examines the accountability, I guess you'd say, of the fiction that develops in response to these atrocities. Since human beings try their best to distance themselves from trauma, they're already poor interpretors of it. On top of this, the really bad stuff in human history (the Holocaust and other genocides are often mentioned) automatically distance the reader (and often the writer) from the event because they were not there in the first place. Good so far? Sweet.
It gets even trickier though because whether they were there or not, trauamtic events are so traumatizing, that even first-hand accounts can be skewed, misrepresented, inauthentic, and the synonyms go on and on here. If you're afflicted by the negative impacts of the trauma (delerious with fever, for example) you're not a great first-hand source, even if you were there. If you weren't there, what can you really say about it? Writers can only do their best, as it is--maybe that's how it has always been.
As damaging as the death of Sarah Turpin was for a lot of us, she was no Holocaust. The challenge for me is to narrow what is meant to be a grand concept into a minute, personal occurrence. It is the death or loss of many that trauma theory tends to hinge on. Catherine Belling refers to it (in her paper Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and Trauma of Pandemic Fluenza) as a "loss of access to personal narratives. The collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over that of the individual." If you can access the paper, you'll find that near the beginning, page 56. According to Belling, then, trauma de-centers the individual, bypassing the person so as to refer to the greater atrocity's whole. We try and find statistics and total numbers for loss of life, placing large-scale loss into an understandable context. Humans tend to mathemetize things. A number is something that you can at least try to wrap your head around, victims and perpetrators be damned! By discussing grand loss on a grand scale, the individuals who experience trauma--indeed, who make up trauma, are forgotten.
Now, we're not gonna forget Sarah. But are we remembering her the way we intended to when she was still alive? Or is the personal trauma experienced by me, her friends, her family, distorting what it is that we're actually mourning?