Are we just posturing to be the greatest griever of all?

The inevitable first step in coping with a musician's death is to evaluate what the artist's music has meant in your own small, meaningless life.

Of course, last Saturday, Whitney Houston died and so:

Memory 1: In third grade, our choir sang "The Greatest Love of All." This was noteworthy because it had not been included in the canon of lousy songs elementary school choirs often sing.

Memory 2: By middle school, if you hadn't asked a girl to dance by the time the first notes of "I Will Always Love You" played, well, tough luck, buddy. Go stand in the corner with the other dudes and stuff those sweaty hands in your pocket, because "I Will Always Love You" was always the last song. Dance over.

Memory 3: What kind of weirdo would I be if I walked around the house singing made-up lyrics to the dog to the tune of "I'm Every Woman." So glad I've never done that.

But beyond a little navel gazing, then what?

Jennifer Hudson sings a Whitney song at the Grammys. Appropriate.

Fans make Facebook posts, upload YouTube videos. Tributes come a la Twitter. A career in 140 characters.

Monday night, a local news anchor talked about a Whitney Houston memorial the next day in Newport News.

I turned, again, to my own memories of Whitney Houston, and I hesitated. I felt sympathy for her family and closest friends, but that was it.

Should I feel more grief? Who, I wondered, was sad enough to attend the kind of service planned on the Peninsula?

The first words Bishop Kendrick Turner said to me when I asked about the memorial: "Standing room only."

Turner, who coordinated the service in Newport News, said 200 people showed up at the Hiram Grand Lodge. They listened to Houston's songs, including, of course, the one from "The Bodyguard" soundtrack, "I Will Always Love You."

When we spoke Tuesday after the service, Turner said he would have booked a bigger place if he had known so many people would come.

Then, he offered quickly, "I wish she had never met Bobby," referring to singer Bobby Brown, Houston's ex-husband and an easy one to blame this week for all her troubles.

Granted, Turner didn't know Bobby. Or Whitney. Nor, most likely, did anyone else who was there Tuesday.

I asked him why people felt like they needed to attend.

Houston's death - and her reported drug use - is a reminder that we all need a community to support us, he said.

And so we grieve.

In the 2009 book "Adolescent encounters with death, bereavement, and coping," David Balk and Charles Corr sum it up this way: "Expressing this sense of loss on the Internet and with peers provides a sense of connection and community."

A few weeks ago, in the wake of the Joe Paterno scandal, the sportswriter Joe Posnanski blogged about the idea of competitive outrage, particularly when it came to Paterno and the sexual abuse case involving Penn State.

Posnanski's idea was that many of us, and our online personas, engage in a contest to see who can be the most vehement in our denials, the most pure of heart in our anger, the most absolute in our convictions, when a scandal breaks.

That idea also has carried over to grieving: who can feel the deepest sorrow?

This is not to discount the tangible influence celebrities hold over us. But I wonder if we have become so disconnected from each other that when someone, even a person on the furthest orbits of our lives, dies, we react passionately. Maybe too passionately. We post our favorite songs. OMG. RIP.

We act how we think we should act.

Every couple of days comes an outpouring of grief for the most famous of the newly dead. It starts appreciatively but quickly moves to hyperbole, to who is grieving the most, crying the hardest. An ABC News special this week started with the commentary "The world has lost its voice."

Some express genuine sadness. Others, like me, privately puzzle over why we don't consistently feel the loss more deeply, as if there is a missing gene in our circuit boards.

Megan Garber wrote on The Atlantic magazine website how technology had sped up the grieving process. "It was a little bit awkward still to be talking about Whitney. Today, even more so. It's just so... Saturday night."

That was Monday.

By talking about it, by posting YouTube videos of the national anthem, by playing greatest hits collections on repeat, a patchwork community of grief forms.

But then someone else dies, in a car crash, in a fire.

We do it all again.

And still, none of it makes any sense.

Mike Gruss, 757-446-2277, mike.gruss@pilotonline.com, pilotonline.com/gruss