There is something ineffably hollow–almost vulgar–about the exercise, about this merchandising of grief. So I’m hardly surprised that the same site inviting me to pray for John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and his sister-in-law also asks me to “sound off” and speculate, “Did hubris kill? Or just bad luck?” and to vote on the “why behind the decades of tragedies suffered by the Kennedy family.”
Nonetheless, we are ennobled by the sense that, gathered around computer screens and television sets, we are somehow sharing the families’ burden. Real grief, however, is much more profound and infinitely more painful than what so many Americans seem to be feeling. What we are sharing is media-orchestrated empathy, abetted by celebrity-charged curiosity, bordering on voyeurism, of the sort that kept us glued to the small screen during O. J. Simpson’s Bronco ride. Few Americans are suffering through the overwhelming sense of emptiness, of a world shattering, that friends and family feel when a loved one suddenly dies.
In those cases, we usually miss the ordinary things most acutely. The shared jokes and memories; the simple, reassuring presence of a connected soul. The loss of such everyday things is deeply–almost constantly–felt during the early stages of grief. Yet most people never had those things with John Kennedy Jr., and therefore cannot miss them. What we had was the illusion of intimacy, a kind of virtual intimacy of the sort that one gains from watching a favorite performer on the silver screen.
Of course, it was not the big screen that made Kennedy so much a part of our lives. It was television and countless magazines and newspapers that introduced us to an adorable child who grew into a commoner-prince starring in a fairy-tale romance that suddenly became a tragedy. For New Yorkers at least, that feeling of familiarity was accentuated by the occasional Kennedy sighting–in Central Park, on his bike, in the subway. The hero’s death naturally leaves the audience in tears. But since the intimacy was only an illusion, the concomitant grief is not grief in the normal sense of the word. It is virtual grief and, inevitably, it finds a home in the virtual world.
None of this is to take anything away from the memory of a young man who was as decent as they come, and of two women, brimming with possibilities, who deserved to live long, full lives. Nor is it to say that there is something wrong with people weeping over the deaths of those they knew only as images. Empathy, even if tinged with a morbid curiosity, is an estimable human trait (though it would be nice if we had more of it for people who are neither glamorous nor famous).
The virtual grief that so much of the public feels, however, should not be confused with the actual grief of family, friends and co-workers fortunate enough to have known the human beings behind the fantasy. Those outside the Kennedy orbit can go through the ritual of mourning without having to feel the actual pain, anger and depression that accompany real grief. In fact, those of us outside of “Camelot” have really lost very little. All we ever had was the image. And as other great modern icons, from John Kennedy senior to Marilyn Monroe, have demonstrated, the beloved image need never die. It can thrill and inspire us forever.
