Life & Mortality Quote by Shepard Smith

In a culture trained to treat tragedy like a stopwatch event, Shepard Smith deliberately kicks the clock out from under the story. The line opens with a concession to the newsroom reflex - "the exact time of death" - then pivots hard: not now. That small act of triage is the real point. Smith is trying to pull the audience out of the morbid precision that cable coverage can mistake for importance, and into a different kind of attention: memory, meaning, and scale.

The phrasing does double duty. "I think" is a softener, but also a quiet assertion of editorial judgment: a journalist choosing what deserves emphasis in real time. The "for we will be reliving" moves from observer to participant, recruiting viewers into a collective ritual. It's not just that John Paul mattered; it's that the media, the public, and history are about to collaborate in remaking his life into narrative. "Reliving" hints at replay loops, montages, anniversaries - the machinery of commemoration that both honors and simplifies.

Context matters: this is the voice of live coverage, when facts arrive unevenly and the temptation is to fill air with granular updates. Smith's sentence resists that pressure by reframing the news peg. The escalating timeline - days, weeks, years, decades, centuries - is almost liturgical, a rhetorical widening of the lens that makes the immediate detail feel petty. Subtext: the real story isn't the minute he died; it's why he will keep being used as a measure of what we value.