We all grieve the passing of someone close to us, someone whose path crossed our own, someone whose influence marked our lives.
The death of strangers we note with gravity and sadness, but most often without the same lingering feelings of deep mourning. This layer of distance we feel toward those not part of our inner constellation protects us. Were it not so, we would be unable to bear our daily reading of the newspaper, listening to the radio, or watching news coverage.
But there are exceptions to this hierarchy of mourning. Sometimes, the death of strangers touches us in profound and unexpected ways, for myriad reasons or for no apparent reason at all. In our culture, the death of celebrities can set off a wave of public grieving for a person whose life seems distant from the lives of those who mourn. The untimely death of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, for example, caused this kind of widespread expression of grief. More recently, the death of pop star Michael Jackson left people “throughout the world,” CNN reports noted, “struggling with their feelings” of loss. Often the lasting power of such public spectacles of grief result from an interplay of spontaneous expression and media construction, authentic feeling and (self-serving) artifice. The strangers whose deaths touch us most deeply reveal something about our aspirations, fears, desires and anxieties.
As it happened, the day the news of Jackson’s death broke, I was exchanging e-mails with friends and colleagues about a tragedy that had occurred earlier in the month. As the media filled with retrospectives about the troubled pop star, we were still struggling to come to terms with the brutal killing of a man named Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who was killed in the line of duty. While the pop singer’s death was followed by days of tribute, Johns’ violent death fell out of public notice within a few days after the attack in the museum that cost the guard his life. Yet his death touched us deeply, and unsettled us.
Of course, Johns wasn’t a stranger. He was known well by others who worked at the museum. And like others, I had come to know him over time in the course of frequent visits to the museum for research, conferences, workshops and committee meetings. In the weeks following the terrible shooting at the Holocaust museum, we spoke and wrote of the man we remembered – warm and good-humoured, yet at the same time thoroughly professional and conscientious. Our e-mails were filled with remembered encounters with Johns, as well as concern for his family and outrage at the senselessness of the tragedy.
While Johns was not a stranger to me, he was also not a personal friend. But his death touched me in deep ways. Not long after the shooting, I marked the 41st yahrzeit for my father. I thought of Johns’ children and how the loss of a parent will stay with them, shaping their childhood, and even their adulthood. That loss will challenge them, but at the same time, the memory of his heroism can serve to inspire and guide them, to be a blessing.
The attack on the Holocaust museum by a white supremacist had frightening resonances, especially for the Holocaust survivors who serve as docents and were present that day. But the service that cost Johns his life, and the service of his fellow officers, reminds us of the difference between that bleak period of history and our own time – between then and there, and here and now.
The anti-Semitic and racist hatred that fuelled Nazi violence and resulted in the catastrophe of the Holocaust was abetted by both government sanction and the complicity of others. The self-sacrificing courage of Johns at the museum on the Washington Mall serves as a counter-example. The official tribute to him – the closing of the museum for a day to honour his memory, the second closing to accommodate his memorial service – as well as the many visitors to the museum after the shooting are a way to celebrate his spirit, as well as to resist the forces of hatred that, sadly, have been weakened but not yet defeated.
