Recent Celebrity Deaths

Such opportunities for projections...

This fascination with celebrities gets really interesting when our particular heroes and heroines die. Whether through accidents like Princess Diana, James Dean. Whether through overdosing on their particular choice of drugs as Jimmy Hendrix and and Marilyn Monroe. Or after a long and successful career like Elizabeth Taylor and Humphrey Bogart.

The deaths of our beloved celebrities seem to serve a function in our modern day society: they allow us to grieve and mourn publicly. They give us the opportunity to express feelings that we would have a hard time sharing over our more private losses. The offer us the opportunity of not feeling alone in our grief for this beloved idol.

And - in a culture that feels very reticent to discuss any matters concerning death and dying, sharing our feelings about recent celebrity deaths is OK to do so. All of a sudden all kinds of writers, bloggers, and journalists feel encouraged to use their wordsmith skills at expressing thoughts and feelings around death and dying.

Recent celebrity deaths offer an opportunity for us as a society to get acquainted, over and over again, with our own feelings around the death of a beloved person. Even if it is from the safe distance of an adoring fan.

I will keep adding recent celebrity deaths that allow us to collectively mourn and grieve the loss of beloved idol, a beloved person, a beloved being.

List of Recent Celebrity Deaths

Elizabeth Taylor was a British-American actress. A child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and her beautiful violet eyes. She died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, surrounded by her four children.
February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011 ~~ 79 years old

Joseph Anthony Arguelles, better known as José Argüelles, was a world-renowned author, artist, visionary and educator. He was one of the first to point to the 2012 Mayan Calendar phenomenon, and it feels ironic that his body will not be around to experience it.
January 24, 1939 – March 23, 2011 ~~ 82 years old

Elizabeth Anania Edwards (born Mary Elizabeth Anania) was an American attorney, a best-selling author and a health care activist. Edwards has battled breast cancer since 2004, having been diagnosed in the final days of the campaign when her husband was the Democratic vice presidential nominee. She died of metastasized breast cancer.
July 3, 1949 – December 7, 2010 ~~ 61 years old

Here is her posting on FaceBook after doctors told her that further treatment for her cancer would be unproductive:

Tony Curtis was an American film actor who was most popular during the 1950s and early 1960s, though his acting career lasted six decades. He acted in over 100 films in roles covering a wide range of genres. In his later years he suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and died of cardiac arrest.
(A personal tidbit: My mother once taught yoga to Tony Curtis at a Lancaster Beauty Farm in Southern Germany...)
June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010 ~~ 75 years old

Michael Jackson Death

Michael Jackson. To me he was a person of such complexity.

A child prodigy. Hugely successful in his 20's and 30's. Very generous in giving away an estimated $300 over his life time to child charities, orphanages and child cancer victims. Very shy and soft spoken as a person, and yet so flamboyant and dramatic on stage. Haunted by accusations possibly motivated by greed. Walking the line between African American and white, between male crotch grabbing dance moves and feminine facial looks.

In short, a figure of nearly mythical proportions.

I personally only owned one Michale Jackson album, which was “Bad”, loved it, and listened and danced to it on cassette tape for quite a while.

I also saw him in concert on his “Bad World Tour” on June 19, 1988 in Berlin, (at that time still) West Germany. I was actually not very impressed by his performance, although I made all the way to the stage, as he not once connected with is audience during the whole performance.

He was so wrapped up in his own world, singing with often closed eyes, and dancing completely inwardly focused that I as a part of his 50,000 bodies strong audience did not feel included in is performance. I could have just as well watched him on television.

Nevertheless, all of Michael Jackson's complexity is right now reflected in the huge public outpouring of grief. The Michael Jackson Death Phenomenon. It can be witnessed on the Internet in form of comments left on various collections of photos, music videos, interviews, news items and message boards. It is also evident in displays of public mourning altars filled with pictures, flowers and other tokens of affection all over the world.



I am feeling struck by the enormous projection surface that a complex public figure like MJ (as he is now called by the media) has provided while he was alive, and now is still providing after his death. Such a compelling example for recent celebrity deaths.

I am really curious what is it that evokes such a flood of emotional responses from people from all over the world, as his popularity is not confined to his place of origin, the USA.

Is there something more to a person like MJ, something more intangible and ethereal, which people all over the world are picking up unconsciously? What is possibly being expressed here through this public mourning?

What if there was a large soul inside the body and persona of MJ, having chosen to use the medium of being a celebrity, that is a worldly popular and humanly complex persona, to become visible? What if mourning for his death and therefore his absence from the physical world is a way to mourn our own unfulfilled dreams and possibilities terminated too early?

Whatever the reasons, one thing I know for sure: MJ definitely touched many, many lives, most likely for a variety of reasons.

Return from Recent Celebrity Deaths to A Good Dying Home