A million assassinations

‘Assassinate’, as all of you may know, means to kill someone. Someone important. Politicians are assassinated. Popes are assassinated. Even evil generals leading death armies are assassinated. What about all of us? We are just killed. We are murdered and, just if somebody cares about us, we are strangled, hung, drowned. If we are lucky, we are shot and some tabloid shows our creepy corpse’s picture on the front page.

What about our sons? What about our fathers? What about them who taught us and loved us? They were killed in that far away war; fighting for something they had never known. They were stabbed by that odd junkie mugger who was wandering in the night. They suffered from heart disease. They were caught in that massacre which was called “car crash”. Their lungs stopped, their brains blew up. They died. They passed away. They just weren’t anymore.

Assassination… The old Latin word still comes to my mind. We keep it aside for those who bump into us every night on the news. For those who were working in the bright marble office. We store it and take care of it, as if it were our most precious diamond, just to use it when our mighty leaders pass away. Assassination is meant only for those whose name will be written within our sons’ history textbooks’ pages. It seems that our personal history, our own path, doesn’t make any sense to the big matter of death. Apparently, all the efforts we make to move despair a couple of meters away are of no importance. They’ll never be elegant enough for assassination. Elegant… The word echoes in my mind and I imagine pretty Audrey Hepburn -all dressed up in black- softly touching the trigger before the bullet goes through my heart. She smiles at me and fades, and while my mind fades in too I wonder what the hell has elegance to do with death. I wonder what it has to do to importance.

Let’s be honest. Our fathers and son will never be hung on the National Gallery walls with a sign –oil on canvas- below them. They never went down in history and they will never do. They just belong to us. They belong to our life. They are not smart and they won’t die in the stunning way that assassination demands. And despite of those who loved us never being somebody special, as years go by and our very own heroes –the real ones- fall, we cannot help feeling as if we had witnessed a million assassinations.

Picture by photosur