By Audrey Love
Death is one of the few things as human beings we can be certain of, and yet when someone whom we care about and love dies, it still has the power to surprise and even eviscerate us.
The recent passing of two beloved Brits, music legend David Bowie (Jones) and actor Alan Rickman (better known as Prof. Severus Snape), like many celebrity deaths prompted an outpouring of grief and fond reminiscences, both by those close to them and more noticeably by their respective fan bases.
Mourning celebrities is kind of an odd phenomenon, considering we don’t really know them outside of their art. We’re largely unaware of their inner lives, private thoughts, and subtle quirks.
Yet when a celebrity dies, the public mourns en-masse— lamenting in posts on social media, while others may gather on the streets for impromptu memorials, each denoting an emotional reaction to the life and loss of these “intimate strangers.”
Some psychologists believe the death of a beloved celebrity triggers a more intense, emotional response because it often ties into the grief (processed or not) of someone we’re actually close to, and that the celeb’s passing serves as a catalyst to accessing and expressing that grief.
In a visceral way, death is just sad. It’s really quite strange, in a logical sort of sense, that someone (or something) can live and breathe and do all sorts of things here, and in a matter of moments can then cease to exist. Forever. It seems like some impossible, cruel magic trick.
The celebrity serves as a vessel, and while their lives are of intrinsic value, perhaps it’s less about the person and more about our interpretations and the meaning we’ve given them. They— as humans, communicators, artists— and the works they’ve created—their art—”intersect with our own personal biographies.”
They can represent certain good (or bad) experiences, stages in our lives, connections or relationships with others, a barrage of different emotions and feelings, an avenue of escape or a bittersweet reminder of lost youth… certain versions of ourselves.
For this reason, for some who mourn celebrities, they aren’t technically strangers. Because they’ve shared something with us, that unknown quality is no longer relevant, or perhaps even accurate. Through their artistry and the connection we’ve created with them, a bit of ourselves is reflected back.
They also leave behind a creational void. There will never be another musical pioneer as individual and delightfully strange as Bowie, and for Potterheads, none who could emulate the complexity of J.K. Rowling’s character more than Rickman did.
As Emily Williams Davis so eloquently put it, “It’s always sad when a remarkable artist is lost, if for no other reason than we have lost the potential to reach someone who may have been in genuine need of that next film, album, book, painting.”
So are we mourning the person, or the things they’ve created, embodied, and become for us? Maybe both, and maybe either way, it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps mourning the death of one we call a “celebrity” isn’t so strange, because we’re not grieving them, exactly, but rather a part of ourselves.
