THBBM - Alas, poor Urich, I knew him well

Alas, poor Urich, I knew him well
I don't mean anything by this, but is there any reason why he's black?
4-18

Actor Robert Urich passed away yesterday. He was 52 years old. The story was tucked away within a bulleted list on one of the news sites that I visit frequently. Very small print. Very few details...
: The news hit me hard, the way that only unexpected bad news can. My shoulders fell a bit, and I found myself sitting back in the chair, letting out a sigh.
Strangely enough, I was just watching The Ice Pirates a couple of nights back...
: It's not like he was the greatest actor. It's not like he played the most memorable roles... despite the fact that when I was a kid, S.W.A.T was the coolest show on television, or his ability to almost perfectly embody one of the characters that I had come to love in Robert B. Parker's early detective novels, he was really just another TV star from a different era.
: But the news of his passing really bothered me.
: And I think it is because when I read the story, the first thing I said was,
"Aww maaan..."
: I don't do that every time. When Milton Berle passed, I thought it was sad, but I guess in my mind I was ready to accept such a thing. I felt bad about Dudley Moore, but you know - it didn't really bother me as much as it probably could have.
: Celebrity passings are a strange thing. Sometimes they dig something out of you, some sort of emotional rush that you maybe didn't even expect to feel at all. And then at other times, it's as if it means nothing at all.
I was in a rotten mood the entire day after I found out about Aliyah's plane crash. I felt sad at the loss of Billy Wilder, but to be honest - I thought he was dead already.
: The world we see of the famous, this fisheye lens to painted images. The way we sometimes connect with mirages of people we don't even really know. The way they can dissapear from our lives and then reappear only in death. Robert Urich hadn't worked in ages.. and yet his passing still bothered me.
It's like the day Frank Zappa succumbed to his cancer.. the same day they found Curt Cobain.
: I remember walking around the campus that day, seeing people dressed in black, this whole sense of darkness enveloping the day.. wondering why I felt none of it. As "important" as Zappa was to me, my reaction to his death was far from emotional. Perhaps it was because he had battled his disease for so long.. or perhaps it was just a reaction to all the people around me who seemed to be reveling in the fact that our generation had finally recieved it's own flannel shirted martyr.
: It's as if celebrity deaths were emotional test drives, practice runs for actual grieving. Depending upon your connection to the celebrity or their work, your emotions about it can fluctuate all over the map.
When Frank Sinatra died, it felt like the a whole country had shut down. When the Queen Mother passed away, one did.
: I remember being in a writing workshop some time ago where we were supposed to critique a 5-page essay written by someone who had been devastated by the death of Freddie Mercury. Everyone in the room took turns discussing the details and emotions in the piece, until they came to a guy who was sitting in the back.
"What did you think of the story?" they asked.
"Who cares?" he answered, "Queen Sucks."
: People die every day. Families are shattered, tears fall. For every Robert Urich, there are literally hundreds of people who fade away unnoticed. Each of them special in some way, each of them connected by spiders thread to someone else.
: And perhaps that's why my reaction to the news about Urich intruiged me so much. The connections I had were not really to him at all. The connections that made the news hard to take were links with myself. Of a time when I read detective novels instead of studying, or of bad sci-fi flicks that still make me laugh to this day. These things are a part of me. Their resonance in my life is because of who I am as a person much more than they are a reaction to the person Robert Urich was in life.
Because after all, I really never knew him.
: What I know is his work. His legacy. The same is true for Chuck Jones, Miles Davis, Randy Rhodes, and so many others... what I know of these people is still very much alive, and will remain so as long as I continue to hold those candles close to myself.
Yet I still feel the loss...
How can that be?
: Is it a dissapointment with the way that time never seems to stop? Is it the fact that as more people who have touched my life in some manner meet with the inevitable, my beliefs in my own invincibility flicker and fade just a tiny bit more?
: I have to ask myself - what is more shocking.. that a person with untreatable cancer passed away, or the fact that Dan Tanna was 52 years old?
I mean, When the hell did that happen?
: It's like looking in the mirror and seeing a wrinkle. Like watching television and seeing your favorite song being used in a beer commercial. Those sudden sobering reminders. Those moments of unfortunate clarity..
: I shouldn't be bothered by it, I suppose. But it can be a harsh sort of light to ponder. Harsh, because the light doesn't just shine down on me.
There are a number of other, more important people in my life who are also 52 years old, you know?
: We live so much with time that it can be easy to forget that it's there. Easy to forget what it means...
: One day they will all be gone. The Britneys and the Denzels, the Jordans, the Clintons, the Carrot Tops... These people who fill our magazines and viewscreens, these images of lives led in lights fantastic. The ones we love, the ones we hate, the ones we've all but forgotten. One day there will be a small news clipping with their name on it. One day a quick blurb on the news; a picture of them over the anchorman's shoulder, dates in plain letters - the year it first began, the year it all comes to an end.
: One day it's going to happen to you. One day it's going to happen to me...

One day someones gonna look up and say, "Aww maaan"

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