Thanks to David Karp ("Strawberries and Dreams," April 13) for validating this collective mourning of flavor and for explaining where it has gone: tossed by the wayside in favor of more pickable, shippable produce.

It may also signal the end of a tradition of collective mourning as old as modern warfare.

He is a passionate advocate of improved mental health treatment for soldiers, and more vigorous effort to prevent PTSD, and has cited classical Greek theater and the collective mourning described in the Iliad as possible precedents.

With the international anniversary ceremony to take place in Moscow on Monday, the German event on Sunday was akin to a private affair, an act of collective mourning and a demonstration of willingness to face history unflinchingly.

Stern's paintings The Gatherings are powerful monuments of collective mourning after the events of September 11, 2001.

Its about the collective mourning of her fans.

Settings of the Latin requiem text are interwoven with nine poems by Wilfred Owen, and the music flows seamlessly between the bold gestures of collective mourning and the intimate incantations of private loss.

This picture of Kim Jong-il in life is as surreal as the images of extravagant collective mourning for his death that have filled the state media of North Korea this week.

I sought some kind of acknowledgement of the suffering I had seen, some kind of change or traces of a collective mourning.

Their families gathered yesterday for a memorial service on the 10th anniversary of the 1993 bombing, their private grief overshadowed by the nation's collective mourning for thousands of later World Trade Center victims.