What is it that touches us so deeply when we lose our pop culture icons?
Losing celebrities
Certainly, when celebrities pass away, we grieve the loss of talent. And we grieve for people we grew up wanting to emulate – watching, hearing, and admiring during impressionable years. We are also fascinated by celebrity, with those who lead sensational lives (with or without talent or accomplishment), compared to our own.
Both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson were larger than life, and in the public eye over the course of years. Their legacies are dramatically different, as are the circumstances of their deaths, and processing the loss of both of these personalities in a single day is unexpected.
But for some of us, our grieving is less about them than it is about ourselves. It’s a sorrowful twofer, the death of an icon, and a reminder that our youth is passing.
In the 1980s I was in my twenties. Single. As the saying goes, I worked hard and played hard. When I think of Michael Jackson, I can hear “Thriller” in my head, feel its beat in my body, the sensation of dancing for hours. I can recall the scent of my perfume – Halston – a fragrance that blended well with hot skin and long nights spent working up a sweat on the dance floor.
Farrah’s passing
Farrah is another story. In the late 1970s, like so many other young girls, I wanted her hair, her smile, and her body. I wanted to master her every maneuver, and get the boy next to me in Calculus to ask me out. I wanted to be like her; my older brother wanted to sleep with her.
I also had to process (and reconcile) the uneasy contradictions of flirtatious sexuality and the ideals of feminism; I was both appalled by and drawn to the jiggle antics of Charlie’s Angels. I was more at ease with Fawcett in later years, when, as a maturing woman, she sought to move past her youthful reputation and take on serious acting challenges. I admired her for achieving critical acclaim in her 40s, and baring herself for Playboy – audaciously – at 50.
In both cases, Fawcett and Jackson have played roles in the personal lives and memories of millions of people – those who saw them perform, who watched them on television or video, who listened to them. Both seemed too young to go, but they are gone.
Celebrities in our lives
The question remains: since few of us actually knew them, what are we really grieving? The only answer I can come up with is that we are grieving our own youth. If they are gone, our own mortality cannot be far off.
If we graciously accept our aging (I admit, not easily done), we should also be able to smile at recollections of earlier days – moments of teenage indulgence, romance, adventure, and yearning. Moments of innocence. Moments of breaking the rules and getting away with it. Moments of vitality.
Circling the half century mark, I’m grateful to be here, reasonably active, still learning, visualizing goals, achieving, laughing, and still part of my children’s lives. I don’t frequent clubs (or dance on tables) as I did in the 1980s. Nor do I perceive feathery locks and a megawatt smile as the requisite tools of seduction. And it’s a good thing: I’m a maturing woman fighting an onslaught of gray. And I’m busy enough holding on to what seems important – my job as a parent, my progress as a writer, my continued growth as a human being. One who wishes to speak my mind, and live with integrity, openness, and admittedly – as much mischief as I can still muster.
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Of the two, Farrah’s death strikes closer to home. Jackson was on another planet — the lifestyle, the drugs, all the issues pointed to an unpeaceful ending similar to Elvis. That couldn’t be me, could it? But Farrah died at 62 of cancer, just as my mother died of cancer at 63. The parallels are unsettling, and Farrah’s only 11 years older than me. That COULD be me. Like you said in your posting, reflections on mortality give us the drive to live each day, do what we want, look to the future and treasure the gifts we have.
A Latin phrase goes, “timor mortis conturbat me,” the fear of death disturbs me. Let’s turn the thought around to mean “the love of life propels me.” Certainly the love of something propelled Mark Sanford, but that’s another comment for another entry on the siren song of the Latinas.
I think most people were startled by the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Who would have expected such an outpouring of grief for someone that the media hardly ever took seriously? After all, most of her revealed public life was the standard stuff of shallow tabloid romance, disappointment and – as many must have thought – failure.
Yet her death seemed to capture the imagination in a way that few have. Her Wikipedia entry reminds that she died the day after Mother Teresa of Calcutta – the 20th century’s saint of saints. Yet I have no recollection that the two events happened so close in time. In fact, I had no recall of anything at all about the loss of Mother Teresa.
The Wikipedia article also points out (from the British Journal of Psychiatry) a remarkable 45% increase in suicides and self-injuries during the weeks after Diana’s death. The researchers speculated that this was related to a dynamic of identification since the rate was even higher among women in Princess Di’s age range.
My own feeling is that she symbolized something very uncommon in public life and discourse in the late 20th century, something that I can’t summarize with a single word. In her case, there was a combination of her beauty, her suffering at the hands of an unfair royal family (which many commoners could identify with), and her constant acts of compassion for the poor and sick in her country and around the world. We commoners are not only ready to forgive the rich and royal for being rich and royal, but we go farther; we love them generously for it when they live their lives with largesse.
Her love for children, her ability to touch the untouchable (remember that she hugged an HIV patient when it was considered a frightening and dangerous thing to do in many quarters), and the love she showed for her sons made her passing a thing that touched the human spirit more than any of us would have expected.
Great post!