Steve, I think you are missing something here. Did you ever read Rilke's Duino Elegies? One of his themes is the power the image of the "early departed" has over us. The image can be especially powerful if the "early departed" were beautiful, and rich, and fortunate....Even if you yourself were never beautiful, rich, or fortunate, the "early departed" can become symbols of your own departed youth, of your own early hopes (before "reality" set in).
Personally, I did not watch any of the television coverage of the JFK Jr. story, and I read very few newspaper stories about it. So I cannot complain of over-coverage by the media. (It was easy enough to avoid it, if you wanted to.) At the same time, I can see how the death of these three "early-departed" could have a poetic, symbolic value for people who may have been mourning, at least partly, for themselves.
From the First Elegy:
.......................................
Certainly, it's strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
discarding scarcely learnt customs, no longer using
roses and other expressly promised things
to give the future a human meaning,
to be no more whatever one was
in endlessly anxious hands, and even to leave one's name
behind like a shattered toy.
Strange, the wish to wish no longer. Strange
to see all those relations fluttering
so loosely in space. And this being dead is painful
and full of retrieving, as one gradually sees
a little eternity. - But the living are all mistaken,
marking divisions so certainly.
Angels (they say) often don't know if they pass
over or under the living or the dead. The endless torrent
tears all ages through both spheres
always and in both sounds over them.
Finally they need us no longer, the early departed,
they wean themselves gently from earth, as one outgrows
the mild breasts of a mother. But we, who so desire
vast mysteries, whose grief so often
springs in blissful progress: can we exist without them?
Is the myth pointless, how once, in the mourning for Linos,
music's first wager broke the nerveless drought,
and how the terrified space, which an almost godlike youth
suddenly left forever, first struck in the void
that other vibration, which now overwhelms us,
and comforts, and helps.
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