Wait, why do I care about this?
Tina Turner, Davie Bowie, Whitney Houston, and why celebrity deaths hit us so hard.
I’ve had anxiety about Tina Turner dying for years. Like I’d think about it and then be like DON’T THINK ABOUT THAT! I’m not really superstitious, but in this case I was scared of believing Tina Turner’s death into being. Do you ever have those things you tell your mind NOT to think about but then that makes you think about it more? I get that all the time and it’s one of the main reasons I have a hard time doing yoga.
“Clear your mind and don’t think about anything…”
“…I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE!”
Over time, I developed a mental tick about Tina Turner dying. So when she actually died last week, I had spent so much time mentally preparing myself that I was a lot less sad about it than I expected to be. I’d spent the last eight years irrationally fearing this day. And then the day came and it was nothing. Nothing and everything simultaneously.
My parents never cared much about celebrities so I wasn’t raised to worship them. Yet I’ve still managed to get pretty upset when three celebrities died: Whitney Houston, David Bowie, and now Tina Turner.
My Whitney grief came years after her death when I was driving around LA and “How Will I Know?” came on (The radio? My phone connected to the car? I have no idea). I was surprised by my own tears because I hadn’t really been a huge Whitney fan. But in that song you just really hear her promise. And you visualize this beautiful young person with everything in front of her, the one in the iconic music video for the song. You see her and remember her and know her.
I think my grief over Whitney was about how easy it is to take our innate beauty, the gifts we were born with, for granted. Here’s this stunning girl with a voice that sounds like God is singing directly at you. She grew, experienced abuse, was used by a system, by people that saw her as a piggy bank. And at the same time she was clearly a sensitive soul not really built to be mistreated, swallowed by opportunism, and then left out to dry when she stopped fitting into the perfect, constraining mold that had slowly risen up around her.
I think our sorrow about celebrities dying is about our actual love for them and our appreciation for their work. But it’s also about ourselves and how we’ve understood our own lives. Celebrities become avatars for different elements of our own personalities. We root for them because we want them to win. But we also root for them because we want ourselves to win.
The lesson with Whitney was this. Don’t sell yourself short. Try your hardest to see the talent and beauty you add to the world. I truly wish Whitney had.
Around the time Whitney died I got dumped by my first real boyfriend. Like the one that hurt me more than any subsequent boyfriend because we were young and the relationship was so passionate and intense (And bad… A Cancer should never date a Taurus LOL).
This was just a year or two after Emily Henderson’s show ended. I remember that same boyfriend telling me I’d never do anything interesting again, that I’d peaked before I hit thirty. I was really down on myself, dealing with a lot of loneliness and body dysmorphic issues. So when I looked at Whitney, thought about how disconnected she must have become from an understanding of her innate gifts, I felt a kinship with her.
Now I’m not saying I’m comparing my talents to one of the most important artists of all time, I’m just saying a part of me saw the dangers in ignoring or taking one’s talents for granted.
When David Bowie died, I felt less of a personal connection to him even though I’d listened to his music a lot more than Whitney’s. I think that’s mainly because he was a lot more stoic and reserved. But with Bowie, the sadness was really more about people my parents age dying the reality that losing elders I’d known, the elders to my generation, was becoming tangible. His music was music I grew up listening to. It was music that felt familiar and contemporary to my parents lives.
I have a distinct memory of running around the Silver Lake Reservoir, which was empty and depressing at the time, listening to Bowie’s last song. And crying. Crying about a person I’d never met.
I was on the set of my new series when I found out about Tina.
We were eating lunch in the garage (this is a home makeover show) and this text came through to my family group thread. My whole family loves Tina. Mostly from Private Dancer, which we had on vinyl and used to dance our asses off to. But also from her completely bonkers (and brilliant) role in “Tommy.”
I think a lot of people felt a kinship with Tina because of her incredible talent, her dynamism, and probably most importantly for her vulnerability.
Tina Turner did vulnerability before it was popular. Tina Turner did vulnerability before it was even allowed. In writing her book, “I Tina” and being open about the domestic abuse she’d survived in her marriage to Ike Turner, she was open in a way that was really rare for the time - we weren’t used to seeing celebrities willingly air elements of their personal lives that felt less-than-perfect. She let people in to her trauma in order to let other women know they were not alone in their suffering. What true generosity. What a gift.
My response to Tina Turner dying feels different than Whitney and Bowie. The grief derives from my admiration of that incredible woman but it’s also about feeling like we were losing one of the last true living legends. It’s about being my age, seeing the people who have been mainstays in popular culture since I was a child slowly go away. Those familiar faces that have seen us through different phases of our lives, vanishing one by one.
When Queen Elizabeth died people talked about all she’d seen in her lifetime. The wars, the changes in culture, the royal drama, and the media that covered it. She was a connection to important historical moments. And I think that was it for a lot of people, this understanding that she’d seen what they had seen. And more.
There is comfort in knowing there are other people around who remember what you remember. Other people who can tell you that what you saw was real. Even if you don’t know those people personally.
To a certain degree, celebrities are whatever you see them as. They help us reflect upon and analyze our culture. Would we remember how sexist, slut-shamey, and virginity-obsessed the early 2000s were if we didn’t have Britney Spears’ experience to look back upon? Would we remember how stupid and puritanical media was in the 1950s if we didn’t have Lucy and Desi’s separate twin beds?
We mourn these people dying because in some way they’ve helped us understand what the fuck was going on around us. We mourn them because they’ve allowed us to access memories of times gone by, triggering images and sounds in our brains that transport us back. We mourn them because they have helped us formulate an understanding of who we are. And we mourn them, of course, because we love them somehow, despite the fact we don’t really know them at all.
That ex bf?!!! What in the ever loving! I'm glad you're not with someone so toxic and cruel.
"There is comfort in knowing there are other people around who remember what you remember. Other people who can tell you that what you saw was real. Even if you don’t know those people personally."
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THIS... this is how it feels for me. You captured it!
With the extra 💥 of Tina being open about domestic abuse.
IF more people, those in the public eye and celebrities, were excruciatingly honest about it; we might find the gumption to escape sooner, faster....
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Thanks for putting my thoughts into words, Orlando.