Kathi Goertzen died a couple days ago. So did Helen Gurley Brown. Gore Vidal died, too, as did Marvin Hamlisch. Along with Kitty Wells, Sherman Hemsley, Chad Everett, Ernest Borgnine, Andy Griffith, Nora Ephron, Don Grady, and of course, JP Patches.
Not just this year. But in the last month. There’s no escaping death and unlike any other generation before us, we grieve for those we never may have never met, but they were part of our extended family just the same.
We are a mass culture, the first. We all grew up together, falling in love with the same people. We watched them on TV. We bought their records, we read their books, went to their movies, or in the case of Kathi, tuned in each night to hear the news of the day.
Sadly, it’s not going to get any better. Group grief seems to be our lot as Boomers. It’s what we get for being so homogenous. In previous generations, you knew the people in your town and knew of some famous people, politicians, stars and starlets and radio personalities. But without a mass media, you didn’t live the same life as someone in a town halfway across the country, or even the town next to you.
People didn’t seem to die as much, largely because you only heard of a death through the newspaper or the local gossip. Sure, there were the major headlines when someone like Amelia went missing or the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and later turned up dead. There were the Rosenbergs and the loss of Glenn Miller on a flight in World War II.
But mostly, it was Doug Smith from two streets away. Died in his sleep. You didn’t find out about it for a couple days. If he lived a few streets farther away, maybe it would be a week. Eventually, he would find his way into the newspaper. If he was just an average Joe, he’d appear in the vital statistics, listed under Deaths. If his family had money or means, they may have purchased an obituary instead, telling us all about his life, those he left behind, the date of the services and burial and where you can send your remembrances, usually to the local cancer society or heart association.
No one really expected anyone to live a long time anyway, so it wasn’t a big surprise when someone died in their 60s. Really old people were in their 70s. Occasionally, and oft time unremarkably, they were in their late 50s, the victim of a heart attack or stroke.
Times have certainly changed, haven’t they? Few people read an obituary in the newspaper anymore, unless it’s the one about someone famous. Instead, we learn about the passing of people on Twitter and Facebook. In some respects, Facebook is the obituaries of our time. You don’t have to wait until next week to find out if someone you know died, it’s posted within moments of the news breaking. Soon, all the homogenous souls chime in with their own memories and memorials. More photos are posted, more words of love and prayer, then we move on to the next.
I’m not trying to minimize the passing of anyone here. I have lost people very dear to me. And I still feel great sadness when I learn that knew, even briefly, with has left us.
Even with our modern methods of sharing the news, we still haven’t learned how to grieve any better. The Boomers grieve deeply, perhaps more so than those who came before them. Just look at the memorials created for people we never even knew when they were alive. If you were in Florida, you remember this well. All I have to do is mention the name Caylee and you can still visualize the piles of flowers and teddy bears at the murder scene.
Still, we must grieve alone and at our own speed. While it’s nice to post a memorial online about someone that we lost, we can’t find any way to expedite the feeling of loss. There are those darned stages we must all go through, and no one can move through them at the same time.
This is what rips families apart. Small wonder why it rips casual acquaintances and pseudo “friends” apart online. Some of us grieve through gallows humor, humor others find inappropriate, rude and even disgusting. We don’t take the time to acknowledge that they may too may hurt, we simply hide their post or unfriend them.
Even in our connected age, we are a very primitive species. Soon, Facebook will be filled with the passing of others, some just names we’ve known in the news or the arts; others dear friends who we will never see again, and perhaps lost all too soon.
I still remember my mother reading the obituaries and vital statistics each week to see if she knew anyone there. Sometimes she did. Other times, the grim reaper had passed her circle of friends by.
It won’t be long before we’re looking at a place like Facebook the same way. We will comb the pages, finding out who died today, yesterday, last week. We will mourn their passing, post fond recollections and then scroll down to see another, and another.
It’s the lot of the Baby Boomers. There are an awful lot of us. Even without mass media, we will grieve a lot in the years to come. The move to the suburbs sealed that deal, along with our mobile society where we’ve lived in different cities and different states and got to know different people. We’ve widened our circle unlike anyone who came before us.
And with each day, more luminaries will pass. It’s inescapable. But it doesn’t have to be sad. For we no longer have to grieve alone. We can share with our new found friends and our lifelong ones. We can collectively recall the good times and recognize in the most public ways that a dear friend, a colleague or a loved one, walked on this earth and that we will never forget that they did.
In the Emerald City, thinking about those who have gone before me, and those who will someday remember that I was here,
– Robb