Letter: Outpouring of grief
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Grief is not all about investing celebrity figures with too much power ("Death by television", 28 April). National grief enables us to recognise how certain high-profile public figures can embody much that is positive and good and life-affirming.
Rather than snipe at the woman who was reawakened to the horror of violence by Miss Dando's death or profess astonishment that untidy-looking people will send pounds 20 bouquets to her home in a taxi, we should perhaps be relieved that we still have this capacity to be moved by personal tragedy.
Christ, the man of sorrows, always honoured the sacred space in each human heart that is given to mourning (Matthew 5:4). It seems mean-spirited that people should now argue about the justification for grief, and who does and who doesn't have the right to feel it.
There is always the hope that those who knew Jill best, and whose lives will never be the same, will gain comfort from the knowledge that other "ordinary people" want to stand alongside them in their loss. I can't see anything sick or wicked in that.
The Rev M GRAHAM BLYTH
Danbury, Essex.
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