“I think the elaborate, expensive display of an open casket with all the makeup in the slumber room enforces the belief that the person is only asleep, and in my personal opinion would only help to prolong the stage of denial,” wrote Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in “Questions and Answers on Death and Dying.”

But Kübler-Ross might make a philosophic exception for this powerful photograph of a beaten child’s open casket, on view yesterday to hundreds of New Yorkers who waited to get into the funeral home to pay their last respects. [Note: you must complete a free registration with the New York Times in order to view the photograph.] The child’s facial bruises, allegedly administered to her by a troubled stepfather, have been covered by makeup. Her case was a bad–and now fatal–miss by our local social service system.

In a memorable article called “Why Do Bodies Matter?” novelist Lisa Schamess once wrote, “Open-coffin funerals and wakes may seem ghoulish to some, but the intent of them is to drive the finality and reality home: Here lived this person, here is our proof this person is dead. This is a particularly important ritual when a death is sudden and violent, a ritual no less necessary for being difficult to enact. To say nothing of the rape of the soul torn abruptly from a murdered body.”

It’s my hope that these words and this photo might awaken a shared feeling of tenderness, and a sense that if united in grief over this particular loss, we might somehow envision better ways to protect the vulnerable, here, and all over the world. This body matters because it stops the denial, don’t you think?