Dead, Death, Dying

I didn’t used to think about death very often; I was fortunate growing up to not experience it close up-I didn’t go to a funeral until I was 21 so my experiences with death were essentially of two kinds: famous people I didn’t know, or fictional people who were, well, fictional. The fictional deaths would be somewhat disappointing (hated when Corneilus and Zira died as the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes), but the real-life deaths of famous people actually had an impact.

I think the first movie I may have watched where a real person died was Pride of the Yankees. Baseball legend Lou Gehrig, played by Gary Cooper, gets ALS, fights the good fight, and dies, off screen, at the end, but not before giving his famous “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” speech. That movie hit me hard, but not just because of the death part. First, Gary Cooper was about 20 years too old to play Lou Gehrig, but he was a movie star. Actual, real life Yankees, like Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey, played themselves in the movie, which was cool, since it made the movie just a little more real. The movie had a sweet romance, sweeter than real life (allegedly), and the hero dies at the end. While it was from an era I was not familiar, it was cool, if a little jarring.

We had a more contemporary version of that story, with Brian’s Song, a real life tearjerker about Chicago Bear Brian Piccolo and his teammate Gale Sayers (a pre-Sonny Corleone James Caan and very-pre Lando Calrissian Billy Dee Williams). Piccolo dies at the end (of testicular cancer, which apparently was much more lethal in the early 1970s, unfortunately), Sayers had a short but Hall of Fame NFL career, and the theme from Brian’s Song (I guess you could call it, uh, Brian’s Song) became burned into our collective psyches, a sad, somber melody with uplifting overtones of friendship.

So, famous people dying had an effect on me for years-John Lennon, John Bonham, Bon Scott (a lot of non-musicians, too, but I can’t think of any at the moment), but that was only because I was fortunate to not experience death with people close to me. That of course, changed over time, and I found myself caring a little, or a lot, less, about the death of famous people I didn’t know. I guess that, to me, made death, just a part of life.