Christina Taylor Green, 9-year-old Tucson victim, is laid to rest

TUCSON - Overnight, she became a national symbol of a longing for civility - a young girl full of innocent magic, curious about the world around her, brimming with excitement over her recent election to her student council.

Thursday afternoon, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green's coffin was wheeled into St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, just a few miles from the northwest Tucson strip mall where her life ended too soon in a shooting rampage that killed six and injured 13.
A 20-by-30-foot flag damaged in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York hung outside the church, attached to the ladders of two fire engines to form an arch. Mourners walked beneath it to reach the service.
As sheriff's deputies guarded the entrance, an overflow gathering of mourners stood outside the church, silently listening to the sounds of singing from inside.
After a service that lasted about an hour and a half, the child's small coffin was wheeled out of the church behind a bagpiper and phalanx of deputies and Catholic clergymen. Family members accompanied the coffin as it was brought to a waiting hearse and placed inside, the silence broken only by the sound of a child crying.
"A little girl teaches us about the kingdom of God," the Rev. Gerald F. Kicanas, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, said earlier in a homily. "She would want to say to us today, 'Enjoy life, live it to the full. . . . Don't waste your life gathering and accumulating, wanting and owning, buying and competing. Rather, seek ways to help others. . . . Seek ways to make others' lives better."
Christina's was the first in a series of funerals for the slain across Tucson. For the country, the celebration of the youngest victim will likely be the most poignant. President Obama, in his eulogy delivered here Wednesday night, made the third-grader the face of all that America's democracy should be.
"Imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation's future," Obama said in his remarks at the University of Arizona.
"She had been elected to her student council," he continued. "She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
"I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it."
National tragedy has bookended Christina's life. She was one of the babies born on Sept. 11, 2001, who were featured in a book called "Faces of Hope."
Her death has captured the nation's attention. Sales of the book have reportedly soared this week. A group of Trappist monks in Iowa donated a handmade red oak coffin to bury the girl.