Life After Death

It occurs with numbing regularity; a young black man, dead of a gunshot wound; list of his children, buried at the bottom of an obituary. In 1998, 241 men were murdered in New Orleans. Almost all were young African Americans, a group for whom homicide is the leading cause of death. But the statistics take no account of the 368 children the men left behind. They are the unseen victims seldom isolated from the violence that claimed their fathers. No matter how well or little they knew him - whether as a myth, a memory or a beloved pal mourned - a father's absence leaves a void. All their stories are the same. And all of them different. But at the heart of each is a child trying to fathom a terrible loss in a violent world.