I spent the morning reading about Peaches Geldoff. Strangely, I’m having a hard time processing this one. She’s a pseudo-celebrity made famous by birthright. I really didn’t know much about her apart from the occasional tabloid headline. This doesn’t feel like a deep personal loss for me and yet I can’t shake this sense of profound sadness.
It’s always sad when someone so young and full of potential dies, of course. But her two babies are the real gut wrenchers. It’s the stuff of nightmares, after all, leaving your children motherless. Since becoming a parent nearly eight years ago, I can barely stomach the news some days. It’s physically painful to hear about a baby falling out of a window, a child being run over or a young mother losing her life. Of course parents don’t have a monopoly on grief and you don’t have to be a parent to feel the weight of those kinds of loss. But for me, personally, these kinds of stories became much more difficult to bear when I became a mother. There’s an intense visceral response that takes my breath away.
So I thought that was probably it. A young mother with two sons under two-years-of age loses her life and it’s just the normal punch in the gut from fate and justice that I was feeling.
Then I read this New York magazine story.