Losing the Light

We can’t stop talking about it.

Even after we accept that there is no hope, the conversation continues.

“Why did he fly in the dark?” a friend asks, and we explore the question.

“He was so young,” my wife says, and we discuss it in depth.

“The family is cursed,” a talk-show caller declares, and we linger on it endlessly.

Three lives were lost when that small, fragile flying machine disintegrated against the concrete surface of the ocean. But it’s the man we concentrate on. John-John. The salute. The smile. The promise. The Kennedy.

I wasn’t going to write today about the death of John Jr., his wife and his wife’s sister. Instinct says you’ve probably had enough.

I knew when you had about as much of O.J. as you could take. I knew when you had enough of Princess Diana that was necessary. I backed off in both cases. On to other subjects. Don’t look back.

But this is different. A phrase keeps haunting me. I see a Coast Guard admiral standing before the cameras late in the afternoon of that first full day of searching. He says, “We’re losing the light.”

He means that day’s search is about to end. But it’s the way he says it that makes it a metaphor. A mixture of military and melancholy. Fact laced with compelling grief.

And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

*

The suddenness of it all. One moment the Sexiest Man Alive. Tall, smiling, picture-perfect. The next, a news bulletin.

I was about to leave the house. I can’t even remember why. My wife, Cinelli, was in another room, working and listening to the radio.

“Wait,” she said.

The way she looked at me. Quizzically. Incredulously. “John Kennedy Jr. is lost.”

What?

“His plane. It’s missing.”

What?

I stood like a fool, looking at her. Whaaat? The ears hear quickly, the mind absorbs more slowly.

Then it clicks into place. Oh, God.

Thirteen years ago it was the space shuttle Challenger. Television cameras panned it upward all white and clean and awesome. I remember the pride. I remember the envy.

And I remember them dying. Suddenly.

Seven of them. The winning smile of Sharon Christa McAuliffe. The wave. The quick glance back. The disappearance into that tube of a thing that would take her, one of us, up there, where night lives.

And then the blast, the streamers of smoke, the empty sky.

“Oh, my God,” Cinelli said.

What?

The fireball replayed. Over and over and over. . . .

*

I try, just as you try, to listen, to sigh and then to tuck unspeakable horrors into that shadow of the mind where sadness dwells.

But we can’t stop talking about it.

Television talks. Radio talks. Cyberspace buzzes. Newsprint covers us like a shroud.

At home we talk. We say the same things again and again. Why did he set out so late? Why do the Kennedys always seek the edge? Why them?

“He was everyone’s son,” Cinelli said. “America’s son.”

We watched him grow. We sensed his decency. We liked him. Where would he go? we wondered. Who would he be years from now?

Then suddenly, abruptly, it dawns on us. He’s past tense. A wild dive in darkness. The sound of impact no one heard. A firefly in the night.

I was at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday. Peter Dennis was reading from “Winnie the Pooh” to music conducted by George Daugherty. The audience was entranced. So was I. Then the night began to darken.

We’re losing the light, my mind said.

“Wherever I am, there is always Pooh,” Dennis read.

“Can you feel it?” I whispered to Cinelli. “As the light goes?”

She knew what I meant. She always does.

“Stop thinking about it,” she said.

But I can’t stop thinking about it. We can’t stop talking about it. Cinelli was right. He was everyone’s son. Here and gone.

How quickly the light fades.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.