A reader can relate to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s family:
The shock of receiving such news through the media is a terrible experience. My father was killed over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988 in the Pan Am bombing. I had news radio on in the background and I heard that the plane had disappeared from air traffic control radar. Over the next three hours the airline knew nothing, and I sat with my mother, sisters and brother by the TV, trying to discover whether anyone could have survived such a crash and whether our father was still alive. It was two full days before the airline could confirm that he was, in fact, on the plane (we kept praying that he had missed it, even that he had had some accident on the way to the airport that kept him from communicating with us). But the fact that his death wasn’t confirmed didn’t keep the Philadelphia Inquirer from publishing our father’s picture on the front page as one of the victims. Mourning that starts in public never really goes away.
Another:
My uncle, after whom I am named, was killed when the destroyer USS Gwin was torpedoed in the Battle of Kolombangara. General MacArthur disclosed the loss of the ship in one of his “communiques”, before any of the families of the crewmen had been notified, and my grandfather suffered his first heart attack after he read about it in the newspaper. (He survived.)
The Dish 