Computer has been down for a while...but back now for blogging!
There is something about summer that seems to attract funerals. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the humidity. Maybe it's the television reruns, but a larger than normal amount of people seem to die in summer. Particularly famous people. Lately it seems as if you can hardly pass a newspaper without seeing a famous person's photo splashed across a tabloid cover with a sentimental headline bidding him or her farewell.
In my own honest opinion, a death is a family tragedy, not a public occasion, and there is something tacky and grasping about newspapers, gossip columns and television newscasts that are so desperate to include us in a family that we were never actually a part of. And is the death of a famous person really more tragic than the everyday ordinary deaths that happen all around us and still go unmourned? What is it about fame that makes human life seem more important and more valued anyway?
Famous people seem like a kind of virtual family sometimes. We know all about them, sometimes we know more about them than we do about our own families. The trivia of their personal lives, their marriages and pregnancies, their breakups and relationships, their adulteries and drama, are in the air all around us. But a virtual family, is not a family. Though you may think you know a famous person, you are only an observer in the drama of their life and their death. And an observer is not family.
Every person's death is tragic. Each man's death diminishes me. But why value tragedy based around fame. When all is said and done, famous people put on their shoes, do their hair and go off to live their lives. And when their time is up, it's up, just as it is for any other man and woman. Nothing is immortal or undying in the end. Not even fame.
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