It’s a sobering thought to be reminded that, at any time, death could come and take you away. When that death happens to a celebrity, all hell breaks loose. The prurience of tabloid hacks knows no bounds, not the least of which is truth. It’s impossible to separate fact from fiction about Stephen Gately’s demise at the time of writing, so we are left digesting the simple news: a young man died, who was evidently very much loved by many people.

This isn’t enough, of course, to feed scandal-frenzied tabloids, who know how to whip up the salacious hunger of their readers: it’s too straightforward, too respectful to simply leave it at that. Besides, the most hyped and steamy tale-spin will sell the most newspapers. However, one of the unchallenged pieces of information about his passing, was that he was found in his pyjamas. Bless. Nothing can convince me that a person was up to no good, if they’re found in their jim-jams.
The messiness of the story is because life is messy. Sudden death strikes and, instantly, a snapshot of someone’s life is taken. Whether that is representative of the life we’ve led or not is moot. If death strikes on a Wednesday morning, while sitting at our desk or crossing the road or driving our car, it may well say something about our life, the “decent” hardworking “innocent” side of us, how we deal with the practical side of things in our life.
Saturday night deaths, however, say more about Saturday nights than anything else, when we’re letting our hair down and enjoying life. A snapshot taken then is the opposite to the mundane and ordinary: it’s wild, boozy, surrounded by people we love, and sexy, if we’re lucky. Is a snapshot taken then representative of our life, though?
Why should the manner of our deaths signify anything? Because we are story-tellers, myth makers, and symbolists, and we constantly try to build all sorts of beliefs and constructs around death to defend ourselves from the terror of it. Especially those poor unfortunates who are “celebrities”. As soon as someone falls from the heavenly pantheon to the ground, the media vultures are out soon enough to pick every bit of flesh from the skeleton, the morbid price extracted for having “gifted” them fame in the first place.
It is human to think magically about death, to make meaning of it, and to seek comfort in that meaning. It is, however, self-serving. When we hear of a “good” end, perhaps peacefully after a long and successful life, we are comforted that it can happen, and wish the same for ourselves. If someone comes to a “bad” end, it becomes a cautionary morality tale, again to make us feel good about ourselves: the person with “loose morals” got their “just” deserts. If the end is not symbolically satisfying, we tend to bend the story one way or another to suit us.
Unless it is by choice, how we die does not usually represent the sort of person we are, or the sort of life we have led. My beloved grandmother died as a result of her house going on fire. One of my closest friends in the boy scouts died right in front of me of a brain haemorrhage. One of my sweetest lovers from my twenties died choking on his own vomit somewhere in Amsterdam. One of my grand-uncles died of a heart attack in our living room, after giving a rendition of “Bless This House” to all the family. And, of course, there are the many gay men I knew in the eighties who died of AIDS. A virus is not God, it is just a virus. Someone dying of dementia or pneumonia or cancer does not “deserve” it, and only the most vindictive hate-filled fundamentalists joyfully jump on the morality tale bandwagon about people dying.
For every Diana, “hounded to death by paparazzi”, there are plenty of other victims of speedy drunk driving, no mythology necessary. Michael Jackson’s autopsy report states that he was “fairly healthy”. It doesn’t fit with the myth, does it? His death was, seemingly, a doctor’s mistake. There are, sadly, plenty of doctors making mistakes, all over the world.
The best but hardest, the least sentimental way to deal with death is to accept its strange nothingness. It is simply the end of life. We can glamorize it and fantasize that it leads to a rebirth or an afterlife or paradise, but that robs us of the zest that is necessary to grab every second of the life we have while we can. We can tell each other tales, out of love or schadenfreude, to comfort each other, to make death seem important, meaningful, even sacred, but in the end the dead person knows nothing, and only those who truly loved them are left behind, in pain.