The word “trauma” has, in recent years, undergone the inflation and ideological distortion that such psychological concepts often suffer. But trauma is very real, and HBO’s new seven-part miniseries Mare of Easttown is a thoughtful, engrossing study of the ways in which people process, or fail to process, personal tragedy and social breakdown and the ways in which intertwined cords of community connection can both fortify people and magnify their pain.

From 2017 to 2019, I reported and wrote several unrelated newspaper features about people who died unnatural and violent deaths. I wrote about police officers ambushed and murdered by domestic extremists. I wrote about an American missionary killed by an uncontacted island tribe. I wrote about a lawyer who burned himself to death to protest inaction on climate change. I wrote about a man in Texas attempting to solve the murder of his 16-year-old daughter, possibly by a serial killer.