FIFTEEN years after the Airblue ED 202 plane crash that killed all 152 people on board, an appellate court in Islamabad has awarded Rs5.4 billion in compensation to the families of eight victims. This is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The case will move through further stages of appeal, and the money may not arrive anytime soon. That part is familiar. What is easier to miss is the quieter truth beneath it, that these families are still carrying a national tragedy through the legal system long after the rest of the country has moved on.

The dead do not file claims. The living do. The living learn dates and numbers they never asked to know. They learn how to speak about the thing that happened to them in the language of tort — accident, negligence, vicarious liability — because institutions require a vocabulary before they offer attention.

For the law to engage at all, grief has to be translated into loss. Grief is not the same as loss. Grief is lived. Loss is legible — set out in documents, files and defined heads of damages. Joan Didion wrote of grief as resistant to sequence or sense. Law insists on both.

A plane crash does not need interpretation but the law requires it to be categorised. The crash has to........

© Dawn