You know that old song “Love is all around”? Well, the truth is what’s always is all around is death and it intrudes on your life and knocks on the door and is in permanent residence. You can ignore or or you can embrace it but you won’t see it coming and have no doubt it is coming for you.
Talk about the elephant in the room, birth and death are the two places where all are equal and in between, all the sound and jury, really are as of nothing: the trick to life is afterlife doesn’t matter, it is the quiet immutable. Once you are dead you are completely and totally out of the picture?
Scary?
Scary doesn’t begin to describe it. It nullifies you and whether there is an afterlife or otherwise, except for a couple hundred ghosts wandering around trying to drag you down to hell or warn you of danger or smash your Ouija board, there is nothing nothing nothing else on earth. Once we are done we are done.
There is nowhere to deal with death except from a great distance, you can only think about it from a great remove and that is why celebrity death comes in so very handy. It gives us both the familiarity and the distance we need to deal with death. When, say, Tina Marie died, we weren’t her daughter, we weren’t distraught in that way. We had the frission of tragedy, of our own death, without the pain of intimacy. This is a great gift of celebrity hood: not only does it allow us to live vicariously, it allows us to die vicariously, it gives us the chilliness of our impending doom but not the heartwrench, not the death the destroyer (for the most part: fans committed suicide after Lennon was murdered).
The great thing about dead pop stars is that it isn’t you… yet. It is that most of the time you don’t really really care, it is just the delicious tingly moment of shock when somebody you know and yet don’t know dies.
It is one of rock and roll stars greatest gifts to us: it let’s us experience their death before we experience our death.
