By lex, on June 25th, 2009
There’s a fundamentally personal aspect to the end of a person’s life, one I’ve never spent much time peering into. It seems like some final invasion of privacy, something that celebrities (in particular) long ago traded away. It doesn’t seem like asking too much to give a little back at the very end.
Certainly there is always a deep impact felt upon those closest to them, but for my own part, I’ve never quite understood the imprint that celebrity deaths have upon the cultural zeitgeist. The Hobbit wept bitterly when Lady Diana was killed in a car crash – of course, she cries when the laundry goes out. But as for myself, I’d never met the lady.
We are all born, we travel through our allotted time the best we can and eventually come to the clearing at the end of the path. All of this is banal, the mystery starts where the tale ends.
But it is interesting, from a clinical perspective, to see the sudden upwelling of interest among people who share nothing else in common but the awareness that someone who had once been famous – or even infamous – is with us no longer. If you can take the common pulse by refreshing Twitter – I think you can, at least for the world that’s wired that way – you’ll note that the “trending topic” of #iranelection, which had been white hot for the better part of two weeks, has finally been thrust aside in favor of Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
I wonder what the temptation is in this sort of behavior: Some sort of communalism, a shared moment in a world grown too large for that sort of thing? Or is it a way of attaching oneself to fame at its seventh echo?
Beats me.
The Lexicans 
This is something that crops up quite often on forums these days, especially in light of so many celebs who died in 2017. Those such as Prince and David Bowie, who were cosidered ‘great artists’ seem to garner the greatest sorrows.
I personally feel that a great deal of such sadness is because those weeping people did indeed have something in common with the deceased celebrities – The songs and films and writings produced by the departed are what people identified with, had feeling for, some even going so far as crediting a particular album or book with being the thing that got them through bad times.
So it is maybe not so much the person people lament, as the works they gave, the experiences they instigated and that there will be no more.
Along similar lines, I have never met Lex and he passed away some years before his blog was even brought to my attention, and yet even I feel a slight sense of loss just from knowing the man who wrote the wonderful posts I read almost daily is now gone. I feel it more than slightly when I read the words of those who knew him and so miss him even more.
Perhaps it is because Lex’s own words resonate with me and, having missed him by a fairly short space of time, the loss I feel is the same as many of the celebrity mourners – simply the chance I shall now never have, to simply drop him an email to thank him for all he has done.