Celebrities, like everyone else, will eventually die. This year has been a good example of this inevitability, with famous people from a wide range of fields dying. Going by memory, there have been musicians David Bowie, Merle Haggard and Prince, comedian Garry Shandling, actor Alan Rickman and wrestler Chyna. In every case, there is a large outpouring of grief from people, most of whom have never met the people in question, which is inevitably followed by someone wondering why someone is acting so sad about someone they’ve never met before.
Part of it is just the shock of seeing someone you are aware of being dead. It’s especially true of actors, who are eternally young even while they age, because their work makes you forget that they’re getting older. After all, we just saw Alan Rickman yesterday and he looked fine, apart from the fact that he was falling off a skyscraper in Die Hard. That film was made 28 years ago, but it hasn’t really gone away, making it more surprising that the actor playing the villain is gone. In our own life, the news of someone dying is often met with someone saying “but I just saw them,” especially if it’s something sudden. For a celebrity, we have mentally just saw them, whether it’s a film they did, an album they recorded or a public appearance we remember. Even if there has been a long decline in the years since that work took place, we still associate them with their productive periods, making their deaths a shock almost every time.
A surprise isn’t the source of the actual sadness. In some ways the person is also not the source of the actual sadness, most celebrities we have never actually met or had a conversation with, so it’s hard to say that we knew them. In the case of a celebrity, people get sad because of the work they left behind, and more importantly, how that work was integrated into their lives as a whole.
Songs can become associated with moments in life, and the memories of good times can quickly become associated with different periods of our lives. The right film can help us when we’re having difficulty in our own life, as we see things in our own life reflected on screen or escape from stress through light entertainment. A good comedian can help us forget our troubles in the same way, even a good wrestler. The people behind the songs, behind the films, on stage and in the ring, they quickly become an indirect part of our lives. We might not have ever met any of the people I’ve mentioned, but they were there, whether they were providing the soundtrack or giving us the stories that entertained us. Our lives inevitably contain the works of others.
When those people die, and they do, we are sad because we recognize the impact in our own lives. We are sad because the world has lost a person who has helped make us happier, even if they realize it or not. We are mourning the person who wrote the song which was in the background when we finally danced with that person who we always had a crush on. We are mourning the person who starred in the movie that we went on an enjoyable road trip with friends to see. We are mourning the person whose joke we referenced at a party that got a big laugh from everyone around us. We are mourning the person who was wrestling on television while we were kids one carefree summer. We recognize that the people who created this art were real people who had an impact on our lives, and now they’re gone.
We are also sad because it’s a reminder that a certain period of our life is gone. That time when you first discovered that artist that made an impact in your life is quickly receding into the rear view mirror, and the artist themselves dying is another example of that march of time. We can’t go back to the point where their work meant more than anything, even if we can play it back and remember those feelings again. To see them die is a reminder that the time has passed and we’re no longer in the same place we were before. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and thanks to recording technology we can always replay the work and go back to that time in our minds, but we’re still reminded that time keeps moving whether we want it to or not.
So the next time someone protests that there is no reason to be saddened by the death of a celebrity, don’t feel bad if you don’t agree. Whether or not you knew someone personally, it’s still possible to be affected by what they did in the world and what they left behind. I might not have known the people mentioned in the first paragraph, I might not have even been a fan of some of them, but I can recognize the impact they can have in lives far beyond their own. And that’s why we mourn celebrities, not in the same way we mourn someone we know, but because their work has become a part of our lives as well. It’s remembering their impact, rather than who they were as people.
