I saw a social media post recently where a man explained why he was shaken by the murder of Charlie Kirk but felt nothing like the same outrage at the assassination of Melissa Hortman. His reason was simple: He "knew" Kirk. He had watched his videos for years, felt politically and culturally simpatico. Hortman, by contrast, was a stranger. He admitted it with a kind of grace, with regret and even guilt. But his words stayed with me, widening in the mind like ripples on water.

It brought back something I wrote years ago, after Princess Diana's death. I argued then that much of the grief was less about Diana herself than about the illusion people had cultivated--compassion, glamour, rebellion against an ancient order. To question that was treated as cruelty. People raged. I got hate mail.

I do not doubt the sincerity of such feelings. But sincerity is not the same as truth. What we often grieve is not the extinguished life but the edifice of meaning we built around it. The person becomes a vessel--of glamour, of defiance, of intimacy felt at a distance--and when death comes, it is that vessel that shatters. The anguish is real, but it is for an idea, a symbol, an image painstakingly assembled from our own longings and projections.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew this long before television or tabloids. In "Spring and Fall," he speaks to a child named Margaret, who weeps at autumn leaves drifting to the ground. What she mourns, he tells her, is not the trees, nor the season, but the recognition that all things pass. "It is Margaret you mourn for." That line never let me go. Because whether it is Diana, Kirk, Hortman--or anyone else--we are always, in some way, grieving ourselves.

I did not........

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