Empathy and Celebrity Deaths

When I first got the idea to write this column, it was right after Joan Rivers died, which was less than a month after Robin Williams’ death. Each death created a great deal of public grief. Each person had been a source of entertainment and amusement for many people. The media was filled with sad faces, sad sentiments, meaningful tributes, moment-by-moment reports on every minute detail about their lives and deaths; friends posted all kinds of heartfelt tributes on their Facebook walls.

I kept trying to put into words what I was observing and offer something erudite to say on what we do with public grief over a public figure. I observed how the way someone dies definitely plays a part in how we deal with it … suicide/murder/illness/sudden death, they all elicit different types of responses. What really stood out is that the “sins” from life seem to no longer matter in death. Death is a most becoming way to un-tarnish your image.

It’s this post-death amnesia that allowed the queer community — female impersonators aside — to celebrate Joan Rivers’ best bitch comments about celebrities and collectively forget her less-than-supportive comments about the queer community over the years. Everyone has their shining moments and their dull thuds, but in death, the shining moments shine brighter.

It’s as though the way we publicly deal with the death of someone we really didn’t know is to highlight the good stuff they did, because, in all honesty, we don’t really know anything about the life, health, or mental well being of another person — even those really close to us. So, the public reacts to what they can relate to. They connect to the similarities they share or, in the case of Joan Rivers, people connect to her ability to say anything to anyone without regard to stature or status, a skill most of us do not make use of. She gave voice to peoples’ inner bitch.

Here’s the interesting part: the public connects to the type of person they think this public figure is. When the figure dies, they’re losing a representative of an ideal. For some, loss acts as a catalyst to action. The death means a void must be filled and someone must take up the cause. I would say Matthew Shepard and Harvey Milk are two great catalysts from our community. Sometimes the death is a cautionary tale, a “you don’t want to end up like …” kind of thing. Then for others, the attachment goes much deeper. They associate so strongly with that person, their death feels like they really have lost someone meaningful to their life. The two public deaths that hit me hardest were Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr. They both represented a hope for the world that I was sad to lose, “Candles in the Wind” so to speak.

What do you do with your grief for someone that you don’t really know? Is there grief counseling over the death of a relative stranger?

If it’s someone you really admired, you may stay glued to every media outlet to get the latest word on every detail leading up to the funeral, overdosing on everything they ever did. People can get up-to-the-minute updates on their social media feeds. Then once they’ve been laid to rest, the media outlets generally turn their attention in other directions, along with the general public.

Let’s be honest, we can really only focus on someone else for a short amount of time. Then we have to go back to living our own lives, being the center of our own universe. So, unless this public figure was part of your private life, their death didn’t really affect your life as much as it seemed.

Time continues to pass with the memory of them getting more fond and glowing. I think it’s our mind’s way of connecting us to the brighter side of life. We hold on to the parts of them that brought us joy, inspiration, happiness. If we remain grateful for these moments, the best parts of them live on.