God's Grace 

Sienna Abeler 

4/22/2025

The pope died on Easter Monday. I found out at 5 am in the United States when I checked my phone to use the bathroom. I saw an email from the New York times “Breaking News the Pope Died in his sleep at 88 years old this morning”. I always think it's strange when they put breaking news before talking about someone's death, like yes it's new and it's important but more important is that that was someone's life. I wonder if some people are losing their understanding of the value of life, and I mean, they do that with everyone, but this was the Pope, and even in my delirium at 5 am, I knew this was strange. I've heard that most Americans have lost trust in the media and I hear claims it's because of fake news and political bias but I have a theory that it's more than that. It goes beyond the scope of propaganda and fabricated stories that sell. I think it's more of a loss of humanity within the media. When they tell a story of a drunk driver killing a teenage girl it's just reading words off a script for the news or writing it down in a google doc but to someone else it is their sister, friend, girlfriend, granddaughter, niece? How can the media report on that? Or when there's a school shooting and they talk about the shooter and their life. What about the life of the people who died? Who tells their story then? Why do we talk more about the killer and the weapon than the person who felt its cut? How does this affect families? Maybe my feelings towards this are based on the negative continuation my generation feels towards the news or maybe it's something more. When someone dies it's not news it's the story of someone's life. It's an angel going to heaven not a headline. The final pages of someone's story are defined on newspapers or phone screens but in the lives touched as they pass on and continue their story in the next life. News isn't people's lives we are more than ink we are memories and love passed on down through the skys heaven.