Our Newsletter looks at our attitudes towards newsworthy tragedies and asks what our reactions tell us about ourselves.

1. What do public deaths say to us?
Last week there were two tragedies which caught the
public’s attention. The first, of course, was the
earthquake in Nepal and the still rising death toll there.
The second was a newspaper notice inviting people to
come to the funeral of an unknown 6 week old baby
boy found wrapped in a blanket on a footpath in
Edinburgh. His family have never been found, despite a
huge effort over two years to find them.
Of course other people have died in recent days too;
some quite widely known, some known to their families
and friends and some, like the baby, known only ‘unto
God’. But it is when death is unusual that we really
notice it. The scale of the events in Nepal, or the
heartbreaking sadness of the baby – these are the
things that make us sit up and think. We can feel
genuine emotion for these strangers and their sad
stories. We might donate money. We will certainly talk
to each other about it and catch up on the latest news
reports.
However, we are also at a distance from these events.
Most of us can barely imagine living in Nepal, let alone
experiencing an earthquake on such a scale. Some of us
may have lost a child – probably one of the worst things
that can happen to a person – but very few would have
abandoned his body and hidden from a well-publicised
search.
It is so much easier to talk and think about deaths that
are outside of our experience than it is to contemplate
those closer to home. To think about your own parent
or spouse or even your own self dying is still too hard
and so we continue to explore our feelings at a safe
distance. The trouble is, we will almost certainly bury a
parent, may well bury a spouse and, of course, nothing
is more certain that we will die ourselves. Those are, in
fact, the deaths we really should be talking about.
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