"...And we can ride the boogie. Share that beat of love"

It seems that the nostalgia we carry of our childhoods wanes unabated until family members and icons leave this mortal coil. We live in a suspended state of denial that we will never be touched by death, old age or suffering. We often are unprepared for it when it comes...we are young, unfamiliar with the inevitability of death...we do not know, nor are we prepared for what our "elders" have already begun to experience. The arrival of that inevitability crushes us...and awakens the reality of our own mortality.It is a reality that youth foolishly suppresses so that we drive headfirst into life with zeal, abandon and glee...isn't that what youth is for?

As the icons of our childhood fall we are forced to face the unflinching reality that if,say a musician or actor can die, so can our loved ones. As we mourn a singer or celebrity we also mourn the passing of our naivete and somberly acknowledge that the ones who hold dearest will one day be gone. This truth hurts far more than never seeing a man moonwalk again. I will miss Michael Jackson, but acknowledging that I will one day lose my parents is far more sobering. I have seen far more death in 35 years than I ever imagined and yet it still does not get easier to bear...does it ever? Perhaps our collective grief for someone we really do not "know" insulates us from thinking or dealing with the possibility in our own families or among our friends? Either way it is painful. I guess sometimes you just have to clutch your memories, wipe away your tears and keep going...


I am just rambling...sadness does that. It makes you pour out things best left unsaid and things you hold back from saying. I may be seen as foolish for crying over a pop star, but that pop star was someones brother, someones son...someones friend and I know the void left whenever that is lost. The long march of adulthood lies ahead...and the illusion of vicariously living through pop culture no longer protects us to the realities of age. Sometimes the fall of the famous so sharply focuses us to the picture of what is yet to be lost in our own lives. It is a picture we flinch at and avoid but must steel ourselves to tackle one day. I will never be an 10 year old girl riding a bike, boombox lashed to the handlebars, belting out "Billie Jean" again but I have the memories and memories sustain.


“And when the groove is dead and gone
You know that love survives
So we can rock forever on….”