![[wendy's home page]](../images/webutton.gif)
The impact of losing everyday, visceral contact with Wendy is something that will remain with me for the rest of my life; that goes without saying. What may not be as obvious is the secondary impact that the coverage of her death had on me. I have no other experience of mourning a death to compare it with, but I'm sure if I had, there would be marked differences in the reaction to such an event that is closed to the public, and one that attracts the media.
I have vivid memories of watching the media story grow. The shooting happened on a Friday, on Saturday there was a small report at the bottom of page 3. On Monday the news was front-page on both local papers; good enough to save for the influx of quarters the work-week and its news-hungry citizens brought to the square metal dispensers of "information". I remember walking around the city, still in shock and noting, block after block, the surreal and absurd vision of her face staring at me from every paper box. Sitting in a restaurant with other greiving friends, and seeing the story scroll by in rotation on the cable news channel.
I don't see the media the same way I used to. I can no longer read or view a story on a tragic event, and remain unaware that there are real people involved. The desensitization that I think many of us take for granted has been broken for me, like one of Wendy's bubbles popping on its climb into the sky. I think that's a good thing.
Maybe by including these images and text here, I am hoping that others might get a sense of this cognative incongruity twixt the stories the media covers and the reality that they represent. Or perhaps I am merely proving a more insideous concept. That no matter how inaccurate, the media is the mirror in which we see ourselves; and that imbues us with a certain perverse narcissism that follows us even in grief, or in death.