The past week brought news, as always, of the deaths of many strangers. But amid the usual numbing crush of reports of fatalities from wars, epidemics, accidents and murders, two stood out. Last Sunday in New York, the American actor and medical-research activist Christopher Reeve died of an infection-induced heart attack nine years after suffering a near-fatal horseback-riding accident. On Tuesday, in two lonely spots outside Tokyo, nine young people were found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning after they sealed themselves in cars to carry out what police said appeared to be suicide pacts planned on the Internet.
Death is death, no matter how it is reached, and it generates the same awful sense of loss for those left behind. But what a contrasting view of life these particular deaths offered.
Reeve, of course, was well-known -- so well-known that many people reacted to his death as that of an intimate rather than a stranger. They had seen his movies, regretted the accident that left him a quadriplegic, perhaps read his memoirs "Still Me" and "Nothing Is Impossible," and watched him on television giving interviews, speaking at the 1996 Democratic National Convention or testifying before Congress.