Cheese, Wine and Dead Celebrities

I was going to write about how vacation week is a magical week where all I do is eat cheese, drink wine and go to the movies, but then I got irritated. So here we are.

Every year when the “Who Did Planet Earth Lose this Year” lists come out, someone on facebook posts that annoying - “We Are Obsessed with Dead Celebrities, but What About the Soldiers/ Fetusus/ Freedom Fighters/ Animals-Who-Had-Makeup-Tested-On-Them? Why Doesn't Anyone but Me Care About Them??” diatribe.

Well, I am here to answer your thorny questions, opinionated denizens of the internet! Using the magic of PHILOSOPHY!! I believe that my three credits of senior year philosophy (Aesthetics! I have some!) in college qualify me to write about this at length. It is the only A I got in college outside of the education program, which means, well, it means a whole lot of things that I am not going to get into in this blog post, but perhaps someday...

Do you want to know why we care about celebrities dying? It isn't because we know them, it is because of what they represent to us about ourselves.

Prince, Bowie, George Michael, Carrie Fisher – all of these gifted people created memorable songs, characters and writing that will live beyond them. It is a nice gift to give the world and I appreciate them all as artists and humans. But I don't know them. They didn't impact me. So I feel bad for their loved ones, and I do agree that 2016 was pretty greedy with the culling, but I am not posting testimonials about them. (Well, unless you count this one, I suppose...) But for a slight kid, and an artsy kid, or a gay kid or a girl who wanted to be her own powerful princess – these were icons and their loss packs a punch.

The celebrity death that knocked me for a loop was in August of 1995. Picture, if you will, a 30 year old woman of great potential and sturdy girth who has the questionably fulfilling job of raising some toddlers. I was the mother of a two year old and I was nannying a three year old and an infant. I feel like if you were to watch a movie montage of my life for the next ten year it would have consisted of me taking trays of chicken fingers out of the oven and peeling and slicing apples for children's consumption over and over and over.

God bless Steve. He and his dog Blue gave me 25-30 minutes of uninterrupted clue-finding, Boston Globe reading time every morning. I am pretty sure I saw in the paper that Jerry Garcia had died. Maybe my sister called me and that is how I found out. The internet was still pretty nascent in my life and I didn't check it during the day. We were still dial-up and it was an evening event for me to look on the World Wide Web.

So I heard about Jerry. And I cried as I read the paper. And I cried as I talked to my sister. And I cried as I pulled the luncheon chicken fingers out of the oven.

I didn't cry because I loved Jerry so much. Although we did share a moment once - a splendid story that I foist on every kid who has a dancing bear sticker on their laptop in the library, but I shan't share here.

I cried because his death corresponded with what I perceived to be the death of my youth. Frankly, from this side of fifty, thirty seems pretty darned youthful. But at the time, I was coming to terms with being a wife and a mother and a functioning member of the grown-up world. (Yes, I did have a very extended adolescence, thanks for asking...) Jerry was the end of an era for me. I had just seen my last Grateful Dead show at Shoreline Amphitheater that June and spent much of the evening worrying about leaving my toddler with a babysitter who wasn't a blood relative for the first time. My days of dancing without care in a flowy India print skirt while Jerry played Sugar Magnolia live were definitively over.

So long story short – there is no shame in mourning a celebrity death. Famous people are just people, but they also represent things to others. And artists are the ones we tend to hang our psyches on. When they are taken “too soon” they are taken away from us. We don't mourn what they might have done in the future, we mourn their gone-ness.

All of the things in the facebook posts – the soldiers, etc... - people also mourn what they represent, but they are a consistent loss. There will always be losses like these, mourned by the individuals who were protected by them or involved in the movements to protect them. But they are two different types of loss.

And they are both worthy of being mourned.

This meditation on death and loss was brought to you by college philosophy, the World Wide Web, wine and cheese.

ARE WE REALLY HAVING THIS CONVERSATION?

Sometimes you wake up at 3 in the morning all freaked out because you dreamed that you were in the main hallway of your 1978 middle school bare naked. And sometimes you wake up at 3 in the morning all freaked out because you realize that you are well within your rights to be all freaked out.

Yesterday I was talking to a woman I work with. Let's call her Nancy. (Her name is, in fact, Nancy.) She is this child of the 60's super-liberal history teacher. Sometimes I get cocky thinking “Damn, I am the smartest person in this room!” but never when Nancy is there. She is the teacher that got Harry so riled up that he once came into my room at 10:30 at night and did a 20 minute monologue about Teddy Roosevelt because he was so excited about what he was learning in her class. Frankly, it was weird. But wonderful.

Anyway, I will occasionally discuss the state of the world with Nancy, and as you can imagine, conversation sometimes finds its way to the current state of our great republic. Well, Nancy read me something (brilliant) she had written on the internet about the recent upheaval and without thinking, I said, “Geeze, Nancy, be careful!” She looked at me as if I were crazy. “Be careful?? That's how Hitler got into power! People were quiet.”

Now, I don't like to live in fear. That's why the republicanism I was raised in didn't stick. I like people who are different. I like new ideas. I recognize that people who want me to be afraid usually have an agenda. I understand that I might have an idea, maybe even a strong conviction, but if I come across new information, that idea could change. Not because some underlying fundamental has changed, but because I learned something new. Learning new things is a good idea.

Rich and I were talking about my faith the other night. This used to be a recipe for disaster. “You don't believe like MEEEEEEEE! You must be WRONGITY-WRONG-WRONG!!!” (copyright Barb Fecteau, every conversation about Christianity with Richard between 1987-2002 or so...) But we have mellowed. The reason is because we have finally hashed it out. We have discussed "what we do and do not believe and why" so many times that it has finally stuck. I won't say we respect each other's views, but we understand them. And we are so much more mellow now that we are doughy and gray.

So Nancy gave me this article about how evangelical Christians have supported conservative politics and it made me think about my whole history where I used to not call myself a Christian (from about 1987-2002 or so, coincidentally enough) because of how I saw Christians behaving politically. Well, I am a Christian. I believe the stuff Jesus said - the whole Son of God thing. But I have been kind of pissed at him the last few weeks. I do believe God is in control, but he didn't steer this world the way I wanted this time and I am miffed. I have good ideas, Lord. You might have asked my opinion!!

Seriously, do not come to me, claiming to be a Christian, and act like Jesus would have voted for the president elect. Jesus loves Donald Trump, this I know. The insecure, striving, thin-skinned little boy he must have once been is precious in His sight. But I do not believe that anyone who has ever read the Gospels can find any parallels between what the Greatest Teacher Ever says about how to treat other humans and what the president elect says. Or tweets.

So I have been off Facebook for awhile. I claim. (Good grief, it is brain crack, I can't stay away!) So I still look around every once in awhile, but I have been tempering it by trying to read either the New York Times or the Boston Globe every day to get my actual news. Yes, still liberal in tone, perhaps, but at least they print corrections every day, unlike the internet. And you have no idea how insufferable I have been, telling people, “Oh, I read in the Times the other day – blah blah blah...” Feel free to smack me. But I need to read actual facts, not just people's opinions and fears. And yet, here I am with my opinions and fears!

But here's the thing. I deserve to have my opinions and fears. I am allowed to be concerned that the incoming government of the country I love does not share my views on virtually everything. I am allowed to be upset when people with whom I disagree are dicks about the new administration and what it represents. It was not a mandate, southern cousin! We are not whiny little sore losers, friend from high school! We are just calling it like we see it.

This does not make me a snowflake. And here is my final point. It is okay to feel fragile in this current state of affairs. It is weird. There is a divide. I pray we can find a way to get through the next 4 years with less shock and nausea than I feel when I wake up at 3 in the morning all freaked out. This doesn't mean I need a “safe space” or a therapy dog. It just means I have a right to feel my feelings. And frankly, the person who coined the word snowflake to describe me and my ilk can kiss my unique, white, crystalline, frosty ass.