In the sticky humidity of summer, this is a city seemingly consumed with grief over the death of one man, a man who mostly wanted to be let alone to live a normal life, a man who took to flying a private plane in part to escape the stares of gawkers. It provokes one to wonder about the value of a single life.

A typhoon wave killed 138,000 people in Bangladesh on April 30th, 1991. In 1976, an earthquake killed 750,000 people in Tangshan. All right, let's talk more serious numbers. Thirteen million people died in the bubonic plague in Asia in 1894. In fact, since humans first showed up on Earth, some 80 billion of us have died, and there are about 5.9 billion of us wandering around at this moment, give or take.

Did you know any of this? Surely on that April day in Bangladesh there must have been one man, one poet, one physician, one courageous and handsome son whose demise would have caught our attention if only we knew his name. But we never heard his story, never saw his face.

We can deal with death, it seems, one at a time, and even then we are extremely selective. We are not scrutineers for meaning in the mass grave. We need one face to tell us the story. Perhaps you are following the news reports about the death of just one man. Perhaps you began to read this story because it seemed from the headline that it was about the death of John Kennedy Jnr and you wanted to know more.

Is there any more we can know about this likeable 38-year-old man and his beautiful wife? We know that they, along with his sister-in-law, plunged to their deaths in an airplane last Friday off the coast of Massachusetts.

In the US, the television networks have been glued to this story for seven days. CNN and MSNBC, the 24-hour news networks, have rarely left the story for an instant, save hurried interruptions for short bits of what is called "others news," (Korea planning to test long-range ballistic missile despite international warnings - that sort of thing.)

Television has had its correspondents hunkered down in all the remote locations connected to the story, and has played pass-the-potato to try and keep the coverage going during the long stretches where there has been very little news.

Thursday was typical; first we go to our reporter in Martha's Vineyard, standing on the shore as the US navy ship carrying the cremated remains of the three victims is seen in the hazy distance. Next we go to our reporter in a chartered boat following the ship, awaiting the scattering of ashes, also apologising for the bouncy camera work as the waves refuse to co-operate. Back to our reporter off Gay Head, following the navy ship that is salvaging the plane wreckage.

Next it's off to our reporter standing in front of 26 Moore Street in Manhattan, where thousands of mourners are snaking past Mr Kennedy's apartment, leaving so many flowers that each night a truck comes to remove them to local hospitals.

We also see reporters stationed outside the Church of St Thomas More on East 89th Street where the private family Mass was held yesterday, and other cameras down on Mulberry Street where the Irish community held a public Mass on Thursday night (CNN and MSNBC, by the way, broadcast the Irish Mass in its entirety.) There are also satellite trucks and reporters stationed outside the Bessette home in Connecticut, and outside Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's home in Bridgehampton, Long Island, but they are idle at the moment because the families accompanied the cremated remains.

The television presenters struggled with repetition as the images from the plane crash were fairly stationary; for five days all we had were images of a saturnine ocean concealing a mystery, an archive of nostalgic black and white footage of young John, and sheer speculation about the cause of the crash.

One presenter was told through the earpiece that the cameras were going live to a picture of a helicopter landing off Gay Head. Senator Ted Kennedy might be aboard . . . or he might not. Spin it out, the presenter was urged by the news director, "but don't speculate".

"We see a helicopter," intoned the presenter. "Yes, there it is." At one point during the tortured half-hour, confided the presenter later, "I actually heard myself say `The propellers are moving'."

But the lumpy deployment of reporters has been justified by the television ratings, which have soared. Magazine sales are brisk, and while the public may complain of saturation, the numbers show they are consuming every morsel of the tale. They are also asking themselves, and are being asked by reporters, why they care so much about John Kennedy Jnr, who was, after all, a magazine editor, and his wife Carolyn Bessette.

"We grew up with him," said one woman.

"They were so beautiful and glamourous," said another.

Father John Gallen, a professor of liturgy, offered: "The American nation identifies with this family. They have been able to suffer in public, and we make that connection. We have suffered, and they understand suffering."

These explanations seem clothed opaquely, and a bit too conveniently. It is true that President Kennedy remains a powerful symbol to most Americans; here in New York, his image remains 36 years after his death. In Benny's Burritos, a photo of him hangs over the kitchen. Same thing at The Pink Tea Cup, a soul food restaurant.

But what are we mourning right now? The father or the son or ourselves? Are we grieving for the complexity of unfulfilled promise or the simplicity of another time?

My Aunt Ruth in New Jersey, a bulwark of clarity, thinks the latter. "Well, dear," she says thoughtfully, "We don't have many nice celebrities these days. He was the nicest person we never knew."

He also, like Princess Diana, seemed perched on the ledge of personal sovereignty and that exerts a powerful call in an affluent culture where the thirst for purpose in life is more critical than almost anything else. John Kennedy Jnr seemed to have shed the impedimenta of celebrity and wealth and idleness, and of family tragedy. He seemed to be coming into his own, he seemed happy, and he seemed ready to soar.

It is ironic that in death both he and his family must return to the battles that seemed resolved, the battle for privacy and dignity. With his ashes scattered at sea, there will be no graveside to host idolatrous mourners. Ted Kennedy requested that no photographs be taken at the autopsy lest that turn up on the Internet or in the tabloids. John's sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, has taken firm control of the memorial service, choosing a private Mass in a small church.

In fact, the world's eyes now turn to her, the only living child of the slain president, a respected legal author and mother of three. Will her brother's death bring her face, her story, into the public domain? Will his death compel her to reassess her public role?

Do not bet on it. In her 1995 book, The Right to Privacy, written with law school chum Ellen Alderman, Caroline Kennedy wrote: "We recognise that in each of these areas where we are vulnerable to intrusions, there are other important interests at stake - law enforcement, a free press, free enterprise.

"But all of these other interests, whether government, media or big business, are powerful and well represented. The only voice for privacy - the right to be let alone - is each one of us."