Cry

Sometimes you read or hear something and you think, “You know what? That person has a point, there.” I know I do. And, if you are me, which I know you’re not, that point can stay at the forefront of your mind. The something I read concerned celebrity deaths and how people react to them.

I mention this as we continue with our 2016 annus horribilis, where stellar talents are leaving us seemingly by the day. I do not think it is a bad thing to be upset, or even to shed a tear, when a much-loved singer or entertainer dies. I remember in 1998 when Carl Wilson died. The voice of God Only Knows and Good Vibrations was part of the soundtrack of my life. If you listen to the little known Beach Boys gem All This Is That, Carl’s is the voice that sings “Two waves and I both travel by. And that makes all the difference to me.” And he sings Surf’s Up, too. The voice of an angel. But Carl Wilson was not my brother, not literally my brother anyway. He was someone I had only ever seen perform live and that was in 1975, but when he died I was still upset. The same with John Lennon and George Harrison when they died and, from the world of politics, John Smith, the best prime minister we never had.

The point that made me really think – and still does – is this: can the death of someone we have never met compare with the loss of someone we were related to, or someone we knew and loved? Well, no. The simple answer is surely that it’s nothing like it on the grief scale. Losing David Bowie and Prince was nothing like losing mum and dad. How could it be? Without my mum and dad, for better or for worse, I would not be here at all. Bowie and Prince were not there in the room in person, their influence was everywhere. But in a very different way.

I think that some mourning crosses an invisible line. For instance, when Princess Diana died in 1997, there was an enormous and, I have to say, irrational outburst of emotion. There was a time when you felt it was more appropriate to just stay quiet rather than say what you really thought, like, why are they cancelling the Saturday football programme just for this? Hardly anyone who crowded the streets of London had ever met Diana. No matter how good a person she was, no one really knew what she was like, other than via a media caricature. In fact, shortly before she died, the media was all over her, like a rash, and not in a nice way. And when she died, the nation almost drowned in tears. Was this any different from me shedding a tear when Carl Wilson died, or was it a relative thing? I think it was, that part of the country lost its collective marbles, a massive overreaction and, somehow, it enabled a lot of people to deal with pent up emotions about their own lives.

Throughout my life, I have seen death. Deaths in my family, the deaths of friends and acquaintances. Some close, some closer, some not so close, but far more ‘real’ than the deaths of someone I never even saw in person, not even from a stage a football stadium length away.

It’s that old perspective thing again, isn’t it? I will always wish Carl Wilson had never died, but I can still find a Beach Boys album and listen to the voice of an angel. But it is not the same as someone of flesh and blood, a soulmate or a friend. And it’s more than that: it’s recognising the different types of grief and which ones matter most.

It is all right to cry when someone famous dies. That music, that movie, that influential figure may have affected your life and given you something special. These things, memories of happy places, of good times, are important to the soul. A lover, a friend, that’s a part of you, almost as attached to you as a limb. That hurt, no matter how you try, can go away and in many ways, nor should it.

I am struggling with this one because my friend (you know who you are) was undoubtedly right. There is simply nothing like losing someone close to you but by the same token, it is not a bad thing to be upset about other things, in fact it is a very good thing, because it shows that we are not one dimensional, that we can care about pretty well everyone.

The human psyche, that’s what it is. A drowned child in the Mediterranean Sea, a starving child in Ethopia, a mother and son falling from the Bristol Suspension Bridge – they all move us because of what and who we are. We do not have either or emotions, which we turn off and on to judge whether we should be sad or not. And because we are all, ultimately, related.

It’s okay to cry. Some of us do it all the time.