When Celebrities Die

Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died--a truly gifted actor who apparently battled some pretty nasty demons, like many other artists do. And when I heard the news, I was shocked and saddened.

Just a couple of months ago it was Paul Walker, of Fast & Furious fame, who died with tragic irony in a horrific car accident. Before that Cory Monteith, James Gandolfini. And in recent years we have seen the deaths of Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Steve Jobs, among others.

Those are tragic because they were in the prime of life--many of them right around my age, some quite a bit younger. But we're also saddened when we lose a childhood icon like Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island, or music legend Lou Reed, or the great actress Jean Stapleton.

The way this always plays out in social media seems to be this: Everyone is shocked and wants to offer an R.I.P. or post a favorite quote or clip or song because that person has touched them in some way.

And then, in a few days--sometimes in a matter of hours--some person decides that too much is being made of this celebrity's death and creates a meme with a photo of an emaciated child who is clearly dying from malnutrition or a homeless person in the snow and some variation on this theme: "Actor dies of a drug overdose, and millions mourn. Thousands of children die every day, and no one mourns."

And people see the meme, and nod their head sagely, and don't want to be lumped with the shallow masses, and they pass it along. Or they come up with their own commentary about the sad state of affairs when people care more about a celebrity than these suffering people.

First of all: It is simply not true that nobody knows or cares cares about or mourns the loss of those little ones, or Syrian refugees, or the homeless people who have frozen to death in the recent winter weather, or whoever is being juxtaposed with whichever celebrity has recently died. Their suffering and death is heartbreaking and tragic and ever-present and completely overwhelming in its enormity.

But there is no reason that people should be made to feel shallow for expressing sadness over the death of one person they've never met as opposed to those other millions they've never met. Just because Philip Seymour Hoffman battled a drug addiction and he was famous, did his life also not have value?

It's disturbing to me that celebrities are often treated as if they're not humans with feelings--actresses like Anne Hathaway and Gwynneth Paltrow who are despised for no apparent reason, the famous couple whose marriage troubles are splashed all over magazine covers, young celebrities whose fame seems to trip them up at every turn. Whenever I read some harsh criticism or see personal details of something that's none of my business, it makes me thankful I'm not famous.

In their death, too, this idea that it's shallow to mourn their passing seems to imply that they're not real people whose lives have value. Or that if we mourn them, we're assigning greater value to them than to others whose deaths are equally tragic. It's true, we don't know those people personally. But they are people whose work touches our lives in some way, and obviously some deaths will touch us more than others.

Many times, too, I think what we really feel is our own mortality. It's true that I'm extremely unlikely to die of a heroin overdose, but this is a guy my age, and now he's dead. A guy with a family and a very successful career. A guy who by all accounts was a nice person, a hard-working actor, a professional. A guy who had issues that he ultimately couldn't overcome.

I have enjoyed watching his films and seeing him grow as an actor over the years. I love the fact that a guy who wasn't movie-star good-looking was respected and honored because he was good at what he did. I'm sad for him that drugs were something he couldn't shake, and terribly sorry for his family, who now face a world without him in it.

I'm sad about it, and I'm not going to apologize for being sad.