Sad week? Perhaps you read German newspapers or watched the international channel on the telly? Preferably the sports channel? You know, that soccer dude who killed himself? Robert Enke? Right.

Yes, it’s a tragedy. He lost his child, became depressed, stood in front of a train, the police and undertaker had to collect bits and pieces over a multi-kilometer stretch, the train driver now is occupying the closed ward or something. Tragic, indeed.

The media? Collective attack on your tear ducts. His life is being reviewed, his situation analysed; psychologists and people who claim to have known him in kindergarten talk about his mental state. Just as they always do when somebody commits suicide, right? Right? Right?

Every day, thousands of people can’t go on with their lives and take the only apparent route left to them. Family and friends are confronted with the loss of a beloved one, have to battle their own insecurities and recrimations. And the public eye, well. I remember that thing with the mother of a dear friend. Said mother’s baby had died after birth. Depression followed, not very surprisingly, and the acquaintances? “It’s your fault, you smoked too much.”

The mother killed herself over thirty years by boozing and smoking like a fiend. The burial service was attended by perhaps ten friends and family members.

No media, naturally. Just social services.

If newspapers and TV stations stopped overdramatising the deaths of so-called stars, the losses closer by would have more meaning (if there is such a thing as meaning-of-death). If the media stopped wanking to every celebrity death, the marketing departments stopped releasing C-grade recordings of freshly-deceased musicians just to make a buck out of the public’s collective mourning …

Ah, sod it.