Dealing with celebrity deaths

Dealing with celebrity deaths

Some people mock and ridicule people for getting so upset over celebrity deaths. They’ll say something like, “You act like you know the guy. You never met them. What’s the big deal?”

The fact is that we feel like we know them. They become family. We may see or hear more of them than we do our own family or friends. For people my age, when Florence Henderson passed away, it was like our mother died. That’s because every week we would sit down in front of our televisions and watch her portray Mrs. Brady – the most perfect mother ever – on the TV show The Brady Bunch.

For the generation before mine, it would have been the parents on Leave it to Beaver. Maybe for children of the 1990s, the parental figure may have been Bob Saget on Full House. I was 20 when Mr. Brady – my American TV dad – died. I was devastated. 

Robert Reed and Florence Henderson

I don’t think I ever knew his name was Robert Reed and that he was a classically trained actor who hated being on the show until years later. I also never knew he was gay. Not that it matters to me, but at the time it was controversial. Just like many people didn’t know Bob Saget was about as profane of a standup comic as they come. But none of that mattered. What we saw on the TV was all that mattered.

It wasn’t just the TV moms and dads that molded us. It could have been any kind of  performer that we welcomed into our homes on a regular basis. There were other TV  characters who became our “brothers, sisters, friends.” Ah, friends. More on that later. But there have been musicians, politicians, royalty, comedians, athletes, poker players (I used to play a lot of poker – Doyle Brunson's death hurt) that deeply affected and influenced our lives.

For me, I also felt a kinship with Sam, Diane, Carla, Frasier, Cliff, and, of course, Norm. I wanted to go to that bar “where everyone knows your name.” It was such a thrill when I visited the real Cheers bar in Boston years later.

I was always envious of Jack Tripper (RIP John Ritter) and wanted to have roommates like Chrissy and Janet when I grew up. Heck, I was willing to learn to be a chef if it would have helped my chances of living with two fun loving, cute roommates like them. Sadly, Suzanne Somers, who played Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company, passed away this month.

Three's Company was my favorite show growing up. The show starred Joyce DeWitt, John Ritter, and Suzanne Somers. DeWitt is the only surviving cast member now.

The most famous and talented singers of my generation have gone far too soon. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Prince are all gone. I listened to them every day from the time I was in middle school through college. Every single day. They are the soundtrack of my life.

One of the deaths that most deeply affected me was Princess Diana’s. She was  everybody’s princess. She embodied what everyone always grew up believing a princess should be. But princesses weren’t supposed to die young. I fantasized about her divorcing Charles and marrying me. Then I would become president and she would be the First Lady. I didn't fantasize about that scenario when I was a kid – I was in my 20's!

Just like everyone knows where they were when JFK was assassinated or those airliners hit the World Trade Centers, people remember where they were when they first heard their favorite celebrities died. I was driving on an empty highway around midnight on my way home after working a tiring closing shift at my restaurant. Cars had radios back then and I was listening to something called a radio station. These radio stations would play songs and in between songs somebody called a DJ (short for disc jockey) would talk for a minute or so. On this night, the DJ came on after a song and announced that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris. I had to pull over into the breakdown lane because I was, quite frankly, having a breakdown.

When I found out Prince died, I was at Fenway Park. I was sitting alone in a half empty stadium before a Red Sox game while my girlfriend was getting some hot dogs or something from the concession stands.

When Kobe Bryant died, I was sitting in a crowded restaurant enjoying a great Brazilian meal. As I looked around the huge hall, I noticed anxious gasps spreading from one table to another. I looked at my phone and saw that he died in a helicopter crash along with his daughter.

When I found out Robin Williams died, I had just checked into a hotel room in Niagara Falls. I was putting my suitcase on the bed when my girlfriend saw it on her phone and told me.

As I am writing this, coincidentally, my girlfriend tells me Bobby Knight has died.  She asks me if I knew who he was. Know he was? He is just one of the most legendary college basketball coaches of all-time. He was also highly controversial for his hot temper, but, man, Knight was college basketball in the 1980s.

What got me thinking about all of this was Matthew Perry. On Saturday night, we learned of his untimely death. For children of the 1990's, Chandler, Rachel, Ross, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe were, indeed, our friends. The show Friends is one of the most popular TV shows of all time. Matthew Perry played the sharp-witted and sarcastic Chandler.

Perry was found dead in his hot tub at his home at the age of 54. Like Robert Reed, Bob Saget, Robin Williams and countless others before him, no one at the time of his popularity knew what was going on behind the scenes until Perry courageously came clean in his memoir last year, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The book was released exactly last year on today’s date.

Perry revealed how he was addicted to painkillers and an alcoholic since his early teen years. His opioid addiction was so bad that he almost died from a ruptured colon in 2019 after slipping into a two week coma. 

In interviews promoting his book, Perry mentioned numerous times that he didn’t want to be remembered for being on Friends.

"When I die, I don't want 'Friends' to be the first thing that's mentioned," Perry said in an interview. "I want [helping people] to be the first thing that's mentioned, and I'm gonna live the rest of my life proving that."

Isn’t that incredible that for all his fame and fortune, he didn’t want to be remembered for his greatest achievement? No – he wanted to be remembered for making something positive out of the lowest time of his life. He didn’t want to be remembered for making people laugh. He wanted to be remembered for helping people when they were down. He wanted to help people find the light when they were wandering lost through the darkest time of their life. He knew what they were going through. How many of us would want to relive the worst time of our lives day after day? And who among us would want to risk that kind of humiliation for the whole world to see?

You have to have the highest admiration and respect for someone like Perry. He should be an inspiration that no matter how bad things get, there is always a way out. It won’t be easy and it will require an enormous amount of work and discipline, but there is a foot trail through the prickly brush. The guy survived a coma for crying out loud. He was given a 2% chance of living and he came through!

Perry does also serve, however, as a lesson to all of us that even though we may come out of the darkness, there is a price to be paid for hard living and mistakes we made. There is no such thing as a free pass in life. Autopsy results will take weeks or months to come back, but whoever called 911 suggested Perry had suffered cardiac arrest. One has to only look at interviews with Perry in recent years to notice that his movie star good looks had eroded. One could have walked by him on the streets and not noticed him. He was also noticeably more obese which obviously would have put additional strain on an already damaged heart.

Matthew Perry promoting his book earlier this year.

But it is not only his heart that was damaged, it is all of our collective hearts that has been damaged each time one of these celebrities of our youth passes away. Each time one of these celebrities from my youth passes away – and obviously it is going to happen more and more the older I get (heck, one happened as I was writing this article) – a piece of my childhood dies as well. It brings back memories, but then you realize it will no longer be relived. There is no "rewind" button on life. There is no "reset" button. There is only a "play" button.