Healing tops favored psychobabble for television network heads insinuating themselves these days into unspeakable horrors and it was applied last week, once again, like a misfit bandage, to the earliest hours at Virginia Tech.

"Healing" and "forgiveness" and "anger" were injected by the media feeding frenzy into conversations still so raw with shock and disbelief that a viewer had to wonder if any one of the blow-dries had a clue beyond the one-phrase-fits-all cue card. One might think that until remembering - "Oh, yeah, ratings."

The buzzwords were larded into interviews with Virginia Tech students and with parents who not only were eons from healing but, in fact, had not even begun to fully comprehend the enormity of what had happened.

Some had yet to be permitted to view the bodies of their dead children. Others, students, were uncertain of the status of their friends -- except for the ominous quiet space at the receiving end of a text message.

In a week when the country was deeply engaged in discussing politically correct language in the wake of the Don Imus firing, I'd like to propose the word "healing" for consideration. At least at the hands of media. It's a concept so beyond human comprehension that even medicine's academia seems to be at a loss for one unifying definition, at least when used in the holistic sense.

Could that be because it defies the confines of a little one-size-fits-all box that news anchors seem to tote with as much aplomb as they do a mic? Along with "healing" came the "compassionate" nudgings about anger and forgiveness. Did the survivors feel betrayed by the time lapse, could they ever move beyond what had transpired?

Spare us the cheap bum's rush.

There's a wonderful description on the Web site of an organization called The International Center for Attitudinal Healing that could be used to broad-brush any crisis: At the heart of Attitudinal Healing (and - my own words - any healing) is the belief in the extraordinary ability of ordinary people to be of help to one another, and the idea that we have the power to choose our attitude in any given moment, regardless of circumstances.

This had an especially salving ring to it since "healing" here is not confined to "getting over" or "getting past" but being what you need to be in the moment.

At Virginia Tech, students, the university president, the campus police chief, the parents were doing just that in the days immediately following the shootings.

I'd wager there isn't one among them who didn't realize at the time, somewhere in that primal brain, what lies ahead - the investigations, the division of alliances, the second-guessing.

What the press too often does, when it insinuates itself into crisis, is let the reel run crazily along its sprockets, the result being a hideous time warp rocketing those affected through the stages of shock, grief, fury, recrimination, loss, disbelief, all in the confines of the on-location "special."

One needn't look to experts for what it means to grieve. There likely isn't one among you who hasn't experienced what comes with that: the unsettling sense that color has drained from a familiar landscape, the application by the psyche of protective gauze wrapped around the rawest wounds in the early days, the awful emerging into reality of life inexorably changed by a death, an accident, a betrayal of trust.

The sweeping breadth and depth of human emotion cannot be tailored to comfortably fit into 30 or 60-minute packaging. Time and again, media luminaries who seem more at home talking about thread count on bed linens or, at least, perched on studio props, were gently rebuffed by Virginia Tech "family" members who wanted to speak with reverence only of loved ones, those lost, those who survived. Under the harshest of conditions and the closest of scrutiny, the community of VT kept its collective heart focused on what was demanded by the moment at hand: A show of unity.

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is a freelancer. She can be reached at prosewing@aol.com.