What do celebrity deaths tell us about ourselves?

“Kobe Bryant killed in crash with eight others.”
So read the shocking headlines here and around the world. We soon learned among those “eight others” was Kobe’s 13-year old daughter, Gianna. A day later, we knew the names of everyone who plunged to their deaths into a Calabasas hillside on an eerily foggy Sunday morning.
It is not Kobe’s fault his fame hogged the headlines, that eight lives were reduced to “others.” While we tell ourselves, “