On Monday morning, I texted Mary (my best friend from college and former roommate) for the first time in a while. I wrote “I’m thinking about you today.” The conversation went on from there, but our messages eventually slowed to a crawl in the typical way of two old friends, separated by diverging life paths and three time zones. And then, yesterday (Thursday), I reopened the dialogue with another missive from out of the blue: “Well, fuck.”
I knew she’d know what I was talking about.
The first text, “thinking of you,” I sent in regards to the passing of David Bowie late Sunday night. The latter was a kind of terse condolence letter in response to the similarly shocking death, of roughly the same ailment (cancer) at the same not-old-enough age (69), of Alan Rickman.
There are certain public personae who we closely associate with a certain friend or friends, maybe the person who introduced us to that artist or the person with whom we most fervently enjoyed that artist’s creation. I was 18 when I met Mary (as was she), and both Bowie and Rickman were known to me, in the sense that I had deeply enjoyed "China Girl" on The Wedding Singer soundtrack and was enthralled with the Angel Gabriel character from Dogma. But it was through my friendship with Mary that I learned to appreciate the staggering depth and breadth of Bowie’s artistry, both as a musician and as an icon. My first thought on hearing of his passing was of Mary. I remembered how she dressed as Jareth for Halloween. I remembered how we danced like women possessed to "Suffragette City" - her request - in the shitty-yet-still-somehow exclusive dance club underneath The Metro.
It was Mary who made me realize who Alan Rickman was – he was that actor with the gorgeous, Gothic voice who played your favorite character in every movie you saw him in. My first thought on hearing of his passing was of Mary. Of her referring him by name (before Harry Potter) as if everyone already knew who he was. Of her excitement that he was voicing Marvin in Hitchhiker’s Guide (incidentally, it was Mary who introduced me to Douglas Adams as well).
When a celebrity dies, the loss we feel is, in large part, symbolic. How can it be anything but? We don’t actually know these people. What we know is their creation and, more intimately, how what they created made us feel. And then,when they made us feel that way most acutely. And then who we felt it with, and who WE WERE when we felt it.
It is, therefore, no such a stretch to say that when a celebrity whom we cherished dies, the loss we feel is, in part, the loss of a piece of ourselves. We come face-to-face with the glaring fact that we will never be that person, in that place again.
But we can visit.
Our histories are what forms us, and we carry our past loves into our current personhood. Our memories may be fickle, but music (especially) and movies have the power to take us back to the lost places and times when we loved them or their creators the most. The bittersweet lesson I’ve learned this week is that our beloved icons have the power, in death as in life, to bring people together. Not just the great masses of fans, united in general mourning and reminiscences, but individual people. David Bowie, for me, is inextricably linked to the person who taught me that he was more than just a few songs I knew. Alan Rickman is forever connected to the person who was one step ahead of me (and maybe everyone) in recognizing that he was someone whose performances were to be sought out and cherished. And it’s only because those two savvy "persons" both happen to be Mary that this idea, this alchemic power of celebrities to tie us to other people, even occurred to me.
I’m sorry for your loss, Mary. And Me. And all the other fans out there. But, as has already been proven this week, the music will play on and the movies will be watched. They’ll play on on vinyl and VHS, CDs and Blu-Rays, and whatever formats the future holds for us, and beyond. And they’ll keep on stirring up those memories of when we fell in love with them, and who we were then. And, of course, who we were with. As the saying goes, they can’t take that away from me.
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