Florent's message to bereft New Yorkers is to accept change.
Before the press conference was over, he was asked to justify this statement, which did not tally with Barack and Michelle Obama's reputation for reaching out to bereft military families with calls, meetings, visits to hospitals, and vigils at Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of the dead arrived home.
To be bereft is also to be free — free, among other things, to embrace an ersatz family if your actual one goes missing, or repeatedly lets you down.
It seems to be the most useless of the deadly sins: excruciating to experience, shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long-term benefits.
To our bereft family and to her many friends she was a constant source of love, encouragement, sympathy, and understanding.
But atypical here is that David shows up at the shelter pretending to be bereft and looking for a place to live, without even bothering to change out of his expensive suit, polished wingtips, crisp-collared shirt and yellow power tie.
Rowan the Strange (Oxford, £10.99) is a rich, odd, brave book about tough subjects, populated by characters you cannot but warm to (and feel bereft to leave behind when the time comes).
In addition to being bereft of his best friend and having to live with the many undigestible facts of September 11th — one of them being that all that was found of Jimmy was a finger — he is separated from his wife, Janet Andrea Rothh), who has a new boyfriend and is thinking of moving to California, and he's enraged at the thought of losing his three kids.
But to restrain oneself from this effort is to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity.
And the present moment, right here, right now, began to seem a very comfortable (and comforting) place to be, bereft of dread and full of the possibility of peace and calm.
To be bereft of reason, like a baby or a squirrel, is to be morally innocent.
