The age-old question of why bad things happen to good people
is a little one-sided. You never hear people asking why good things happen to
bad people. The truth is that "the rain" falls on both the good and
the bad, the just and the unjust. Tragedy filters through our lives like
strings of cotton candy. It may look all pretty but it does nothing but leave a
sticky residue (and often makes you fat). We spend our lives cleaning up the
mess. We forget the real tragedy that awaits us all. It's a no brainer,
everybody dies. We mostly try not to deal with it. We put it away so we don't
have to think about it. The difficulties of life tend to find a place amongst
our living, but impending death is a stranger we do not want to get to know. It
is the inevitable, a looming date we will never really encounter. Life itself
is the constant reminder.
I have
always believed that the fear of death comes from our conditioning. A lifetime
of "you're going to hell" would make anyone cringe. We push the idea,
the very concept aside in hopes that our forced ignorance will somehow free us
from our own mortality. At least, it will free us from thinking about our own
mortality. You can try and block it out all you want but just living in itself can
act as the admonishment. Death is part of our daily lives even if we don't want
to hear about it, or see it, or think about it. Often, an event occurs that
cements our doom, even if only for a small amount of time. Something always renders our "blindness" irrelevant.
Although the death of someone we know well may be much more than some reminder,
the deaths of others, particularly celebrities and the like, tweak our fear and
act as harbingers of our very own destruction. The more renowned, the greater
the recognition. The greater the recognition, the more we pay attention. Duly
noted and all that jazz.
When Gilda
Radner died on February 20th, 1989, the laughter did not die for her
spouse Gene Wilder. He carried on, saddened it seemed, but not silenced. When
he himself passed on August 29th, 2016, I felt sadness. I also felt
some form of joy for them. I wished they were together once again. The entire
thing was a reflection of sorts. With my mother long gone, my father merely
waits for his reunion; soon it says, soon. I am always aware that he sits
waiting to die. It is crystal clear that his end is coming near. It might not
be tomorrow. It might not be next week. It's coming all the same. In a way, my
projection of the Wilder's reunification rings of my hope for him. Sometimes
the sweetest sorrow can be the gladdest fate. When I was sixteen, going on seventeen,
I loved the 1965 film The Sound of Music.
The truth be told, I still do. When I was younger still, I would stand in front
of the stereo system playing the LP over and over again. I can sing you any
song from the soundtrack, word for word, note for note. It all started so long
ago. Even then I could have envisioned the death of Maria or Gayorg (they were
old). It had come to be expected. When Liesl (Charmin Carr) departed us at age
75, on September 17th, my mouth fell open. Realizing that the Van
Trapp children were starting to die off, I stood to attention and got the
message loud and clear. I had to ask myself, "Who's next?" The reply
is fitting. "You are."
As a Canadian,
you would think I'd have felt something when Leonard Cohen died on November 10th.
I hold some respect for him as an artist and his contribution to music and
popular culture in general, but I didn't get it. Some of his songs are classics
but only when performed by another artist. If I want to hear gravel trucks
unloading their junk, I will find myself a quarry. Too soon? I felt the same
way when another fellow Canadian, Alan Thicke, died on December 13th.
As a teenager in the 1980s, I sat up night after night in a Bipolar state. For
awhile, In the Thicke of the Night
was the only original programming on air in that time slot. Nothing he did
afterwards, especially Growing Pains,
made me like him more. As a matter of fact, his later career only strengthened
my dislike. I never bought into his "nice guy" facade. Both of these
homegrown departures merely brought it all home for me. God was killing off
more than just the Americans. Even when we have disdain for a person, we can be
affected by their death. Not all road signs are painted in pretty colours.
The end of
2016 was met with blow after blow. When Florence Henderson died on November 24th,
the bell rang out and the final round began. Here ends the story of a woman who
played Brady. For a little while, a month or so, it seemed like Carol would be
the last goodbye we had to experience for the year. It tricked me, presenting
itself as a nice gift from the day-to-day gloom and despair so rampant in the
previous 11 months. The gift we received came on Christmas Day with the exit of
George Michael. I suppose, in a literal manner, it was apropos being it was his
last Christmas. Too Soon? Like some sick crescendo, the entire matter came to
its head on December 27th with the passing of Carrie Fisher. We had
been given a heads up when she was taken from that airplane and put in ICU. You
could just see what was coming. Flashes of Princess Leia met the news that she
had passed away from cardiac arrest. I have a deep fondness for this woman. She
is a familiar face and a voice that cried out through this insanity. Her words
moved me. Her life was an example of how to rise above almost anything.
Unfortunately, you cannot survive death. Tell that to her mother. It was a one,
two punch right in the face. It was so sad, so sudden and so strange and weird.
The very next day, Debbie Reynolds, while planning her daughter's funeral,
suffered a stroke then died a few hours later. How surreal, how tragic that it
should all end this way for them. I'm not sure of any lesson watching this
experience holds. Is it a testament to the love between a mother and her child or is it a warning regarding the
cost of that love? On the road to heaven or hell, sometimes we think the road map
is wrong and the signposts in error. If we stop to take notice, if we study
them and compare them, they still point in the same direction.
What a year
2016 was. I am not alone in my gratitude that it is well over and done. I don't
remember such a tear-sodden, mournful year, not ever. It was seemingly
unending, taking far too long to be over. Day after day, week after week, one
dead body after another floated to the top of the pond. Eventually you could
walk across it, usually on the heads of one celebrity after another. Of course,
millions of other people died in 2016. Children, loved ones, even our pets all
passed away in the same diverse manner. Grief is a subjective thing. It doesn't
follow any arrows or signs. There is no warning. There can be awareness. There
can be recognition but not everyone is so gracious in their mourning. For many
of us, it would appear, we give more time and energy to strangers and their
demise than we do the very people we have in our lives on a day-to-day basis.
The death of the rich and famous trumps, in many cases, the senseless onslaught
the rest of the world has to deal with. Most people just don't get it. When
someone dies, when we are affected, it is a lesson, a harbinger we can use to
be more sensitive to the life that we lead. When we don't learn from it, we
repeat it. I wonder if we get the chance, on the other side, to whine about our
regrets in the same manner that we ignore them on this side of living. We
certainly seem to care more about David Bowie or Prince than we do about Fidel
Castro or Harper Lee. Celebrity death is now a niche market, with surges in
sales long before the body even starts to rot.
On June 12th,
2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, killed 49 people and wounded
53 others in a senseless rampage inside Pulse,
a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It hit very close to home for me. I
certainly grieved and recognized the event much more than the passing of Glenn Frey. It
did not linger so with the rest of the world. In a few days, it stood merely as
another attack, another senseless display of what hate and ignorance can really
do. The shrines were removed and we only mention it in recap. The other day I
saw a docudrama about how the world changed with all the pointless deaths in
the entertainment industry during the past year. Their death is the point. In
the end, it seems we only care about someone's life when they are already dead.
No one gave a fuck about George Michael until he croaked on whatever might have
been in his mouth at the time. The North American market, perhaps not
exclusively, seems to thrive on instant gratification. I think we project what
we are afraid to feel on those things we think we are familiar with, but at a
distance. It's easy to care about the corpse of Robin Williams or Joan Rivers.
There is no real investment so we think we have nothing to really lose. We feel
like we know them but it's a lie we tell ourselves to feel better.
If the good
things in life are supposed to make us more aware of life, then shouldn't the
bad things like death make us more aware of death? We embrace birthdays and
anniversaries, all the while dancing, endlessly seizing the day. We tend to
shun harshness, using death as a means to satisfy our overwhelming ego. Most
days, for the best of us, it can be a challenge to even give a shit let alone
carry the baggage with us as we skip across that pond. It is not only the best
part of living that should make us take notice. The departure of someone we
care about, or convince ourselves that we care about, may not evoke dancing,
but it bears attention just the same. Sometimes, if we let it, all that bad
stuff helps us to recognize all the good stuff. For me, it's all just too soon.
I doubt very highly, at least from my personal experiences, that many people
think like this let alone act like it. In my experience, death has become like
fast food. We say we don't have any part it, and how bad it is for us, as we
shuffle off to a corner and down two packs of fries, a double Big Mac and a
diet Coke. We only want it when we want it. When we are done, so is the need
for it. Death has become disposable, a refuge we can cry within for a day or
two just to make ourselves feel better. All it does is give us gut rot.
When I was
a child and my first pet, a white mouse named Charlotte , died, I buried her in the yard
then I went and got me another one. The year 2016 was much like this early
experience. If you waited long enough, you witnessed that everyone is
replaceable. Sound bites and video clips are the new obituary. Hasbro should
put out a new game, Celebrity Hopscotch.
A different dead star's face glued to a stone for throwing sounds like a plan
to me. It's the game of chance that makes no real difference.
I had
dotted all my I's and crossed all my T's and moved on to the next depressing
topic. I figured that several blogs about the death of celebrities in 2016
would pretty much cover it all. Life always has a way of surprising you and not
always for the better. Fate doesn't need just one year to rip the heart out and
squish it. Weeks had gone by without much ado. Although Canadian SCTV actor Tony Rosato died on January
11th, 2017, there were no signs of any real crushing to come. The
silence was much needed and we all caught our breath a little. On January 25th,
any promise of hope was dashed against a hard cold reality. Death stops for no
one. After a week on life support, Mary Tyler Moore left us all behind. From
the moment I heard the news, my soul cried out for the world I use to know.
Many of my first memories are from watching The
Mary Tyler Moore Show, every Saturday night, with my mother at my side. I
followed her career, she became a mainstay in my entertainment bubble. I knew
it would be like this for me. Who would turn the world on with her gone?
I fell into
a deep depression. The end of Mary Richards meant the end of the way things
used to be for me. She was the last bastion of a life already so long gone. Her
passing seemed to awaken a heavy sense of futility in me. I started to question
any reason I should have to carry on with the life that I was living. I felt
useless, a coming victim to the whimsy of God or Jesus or even the Devil. I
lost any sense of it all, any comfort I may have artificially created regarding
mercy and fairness and compassion. For over an hour, I cried heavily. It all
flooded over me like a wave of recognition. The loss of my mother, the
impending doom of my father, the lingering traces of Doug, all hit me like that
proverbial brick wall. I suppose, as someone put it, I had an existential
crisis. The finality of even Mary seemed to shake me to the core. The next day
I found myself standing in the very same place I have always stood. Turn it
off, make it lesser, try to feel nothing. I would never have imagined such an
extreme response to such a sad predicament. Her dead end meant a final end, at
least to the world I once relied on.
We go
through this life alone and we die alone. Along the way, there are warning
signs, markers if you will, that remind us of our own mortality. Without them,
we would be mostly blind to the reality of being a human being. We often have
to live in denial to make it through even one day. We are all eventually going
to meet our Maker, whether we take the time to recognize this is irrelevant. Death
waits for no man. When your time is up, your time is up. It matters little if
you think you are going to live forever. We form attachments as we gather moss.
People we don't even know become more important than most of the people we do
know. Their death can be as traumatic as any other similar experience. It can
touch us and in so doing, it can reach us with the message it holds. You have
to seize the day. You have to seize your life. You have to seize everything.
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