How important is a death?

As seen in the news for the last week, famous singer Whitney Houston died last saturday. The whole world is mourning the loss of a great singer. Her family is mourning the loss of someone they love. But yesterday at the dinner table my sister brought up an interesting point. She was talking about how she saw this thing on this site about how in the same week a particular solider had died over in Iraq but no one knows except his family, they didn't do multiple tributes to him at the Grammy's, and his funeral will not make the front page. She was mad that while one person's death gets so much attention, another's gets almost no attention at all. Now it does need to be understood that Whitney Houston was known, she was famous, it isn't that the world is ignoring this solider's death, they just don't know it happened. They aren't ignoring it to be mean, they just don't know. The world is mourning the famous and public singer Whitney Houston, but her family is mourning the loss of the personal Whitney they knew. The private and familiar one. No one's death is more important then someone else's, it is just a different circumstance.