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Last week was pretty rough for a lot of people. Both David Bowie and Alan Rickman passed on, and that caused a lot of emotion.
Me? I looked at it as both having had long, awesome careers, and the thought that 69 years old is a respectable age to check out. Could they have done more? Sure. But I shed no tears. I didn’t know either man personally, so why should I? My aunt’s death last year, of course that affected me deeply. I knew her. I knew what she meant to me and our family, and that she had just retired that year but still had so many plans and things she wanted to accomplish. Most of all, I couldn’t help the grief in my gut which would well up occasionally even weeks or months afterwards.
But celebrities? Even ones who created works that really affected me, or seemed to be snatched away while they were still young, leaving that void where you feel like they gifted us with maybe only a small fraction of what could have been? I don’t think I’ve ever had a deep reaction to their deaths. Howard Ashman (the lyricist of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, etc.) was a guy I considered a genius who was unfairly snatched away by AIDS at the age of 40 — younger than I am now — and so suddenly that the libretto for Aladdin had to be completed by Tim Rice. I remember being upset about that in 1991, wondering why a guy like Ashman was dead while Dan Quayle persisted in drawing breath, but I didn’t break down weeping in public the way I saw people do when Princess Diana died in 1997.
I guess it’s the idea that sometimes these people become our role models or affect our lives deeply enough that their departure hits us in emotionally gooey centers, even perhaps years or decades after we stop keeping track of them. We don’t know them. We never really knew them. We may never have even met them in person, or if we did, it was while being one of thousands at a concert or shaking hands and exchanging a few words in an autograph line — hardly the stuff of intimate familiarity. Yet the symbol of who they are in our heads and hearts remains a powerful thing, powerful enough to move many to tears even if my own ducts remain dry. Perhaps that makes me the weirdo.
In any case, the work of people like Rickman, and Bowie lives on, and what good work it is. I may not get mushy about it, but I admit I may have queued up and listened to “Under Pressure” a few times last week — and if there’s an afterlife, it’s cool to imagine Bowie and Freddie Mercury finally getting to do another duet, while Rickman gives one of his serene half-smiles in appreciation.