Comment: Death

Everyone is buzzing about Michael Jackson and it seems like something should be said here, since I try to keep on top of pop culture, at least minimally. (And at least what I can find in Entertainment Weekly.) But I don’t really think I have any valuable insights to add. He was very talented, clearly very troubled, and now he is dead.

Sales of his music have gone through the roof. People all over the world are waxing nostalgic over where they were when they first heard “Thriller” and “Beat It”. Some of us tried to moonwalk, most of us failed miserably. Seriously, he was the face of MTV for awhile, back when they played videos. (I hear they’re playing them now, of course.)

Farrah Fawcett’s death is also sad. She was tremendously ill and tremendously famous in the 70s. I didn’t realize that she was only on “Charlie’s Angels” for one season. I never could get my hair to flip back like hers, much to my chagrin. I know there have been shows about her illness, documenting it in painful detail. I’m not sure what to make of that, but she’s dead and that’s unfortunate.

We haven’t heard much from Courtney Love or Britney or La Lohan lately. They’re totally eclipsed by these two pop culture icons’ deaths.

This is the second death that my children are experiencing in their young lives. Avid readers may remember dear Grandpa Gilbert, our neighbor who passed away shortly after we met him. There are more questions with Michael Jackson’s death. The kids know some of his music, and they want to know why he died. My answer? So does everyone else.

People are starting to point fingers at the private physician who tried to save him, and are claiming Jackson was addicted to painkillers. Honestly, we know just about nothing and we never will know the whole story. So we spin and conjecture and gesticulate wildly and dress up like him in tribute and buy his music in large quantities.

Such is massive public grief displayed in America.

I remember when Princess Diana died. My husband and I were living in England at the time. It was our anniversary. Needless to say, we didn’t go out for dinner that night.

People completely flipped out, conspiracy theories abounded. Nobody talked about anything else for months. But ultimately, we’ll never really know what happened on the road with the chasing papparazzi and the driver and all the details. Dead is dead.

We try to make sense of death by explaining it away. But no matter how many questions we try to answer or mysteries we try to solve, we can’t solve the ultimate question: What happens next?