KEY POINTS:
By now you undoubtedly know a lot about Austin Hemmings, the man who was knifed to death while trying to help a woman who was being assaulted.
You know what his family looks like and what a hero he is considered, not only by the press but by those who knew him.
Reporters have found out all they can about the man who was "Killed as he left the office", as the headline read, like some bad Morrissey song.
By necessity, the media can only touch the surface of a life, of the person behind the headline. What we do see is that his life and death unwittingly, momentarily, have become ours.
There is an inevitable process to the public death of a private man.
For me, this time, it felt hard to take: the tributes to a well-liked colleague, the reductive sketch of his life for public consumption that will have been cobbled together under a deadline.
The portrait of the bereaved family when they're ready to go public with their shock and grief. The public jaw-flappers, like myself, who will jump up and down decrying what's socially broken.
We put flowers at the site where he died. We actually read the portraits in the paper because we want to see how much of him is in us.
We mourn this death especially because good men aren't supposed to die when doing the right thing on their way out of the office.
Much to the distress, or resignation, of his family - they may never have imagined that any of us could ever feel that they own a small piece of him. What never fits is the public consumption of someone else's most private relationship.
His family may be our family for one week, or one month.
We imagine our husband, father, brother, walking out of work one day, seeing a female stranger being beaten nearby. And we hope that the person we love, the one we sleep with each night, or the one that we grew up with, would have had the strength to do the same thing.
Because the man in our life is a good man. Because we know that the person each of us loves quietly is our own private hero, the one who hasn't had to be tested like this man was so publicly.
We want to believe that the only difference between this man and our man is one moment in one regular day. Austin Hemmings has held up our hope for what we should be, our best self.
Then, maybe a week or two from now, we turn the page. Because when we read the word violence, especially in this country, it's like reading Latin.
Thankfully, most of us have no experience of it. It's a concept we hear regurgitated ad infinitum in our press, and not in the chalk outline of the one we love most.
There was a real man behind this headline. Maybe this time, for once, I felt it because his death was so acutely unfair. Someone got it wrong. Everyday heroes, even accidental ones, are usually celebrated, not buried.
There are also real men behind the deaths in Darfur or Iraq. But almost obscenely, I can barely feel them any more.
I see pictures of a blown-up body in a foreign marketplace and I'm not sure I still have the ability to remember that the bloodied arm I saw photographed in that day's newspaper was shaving in front of someone's mirror that morning.
It happens too much now to take the time to understand violence as something more than a headline or a statistic.
We so easily forget that a sound bite does not define a life. That a newspaper story doesn't have the ability to honour the richness of just one person's favourite moment with a man who died too soon.
The necessity of reporting violent deaths on a daily basis leaves us with boxes to fill on a page, not real people. Maybe that is what I mourn; that a life that is full and funny and rich can be reduced to a paragraph.
There is enough violence on the perimeter of our daily world. It is impossible to mourn so many deaths.
But once in a great while, it is a strange, sad gift to realise that one stranger's death allows you to revalue your own life and the good people who walk into it.
A police spokesman said that the woman Austin Hemmings rescued is grieving over a man she didn't even know. What an apt phrase for us all. How else can a stranger honour the passing of a good man?
* www.traceybarnett.co.nz
