Tony Woodlief has some really poignant thoughts on the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I honestly don’t know enough about Smith to feel one way or another, but I found it touching:

You wonder how a life can end up like this. What does it take, for a girl born in a little Texas town, whose mother named her Vickie Lynn Hogan (in hope, which is always how we name our children), who had birthday parties and drew pictures for her teachers and whispered little-girl secrets to her friends on the school bus? What causes a girl to become what Vickie Lynn was? Some of the answer is obvious, I suppose — a father who left her, an incapable mother, drugs, alcohol, the usual.

The usual. I have this feeling of complicity that I can’t shake. I wonder if anyone ever offered this girl a glass of water on her long, ugly path from abandoned child to helpless mother, from whore to star, from office joke to a corpse that will be picked over. Did anyone hold out the hand that each of us secretly longs for at some point in his life, often more for the offering than for the help it promises? We long for it because in our hearts we are tired and lonely and wish that someone could just see that this is so, and more, tell us that he sees it. Did anyone ever tell Vickie Lynn?

In addition to eulogy, it’s part sermon — but I don’t think exclusively so.