On Being Famous and Death

I've actually had a couple of opportunities to become famous. But I shied away from them like they were the plague. It's much more important to me that I have my personal space and life and that's something that's lost when a person becomes famous.

Every couple of weeks there's another death announced of some famous person. Sometimes it's someone I don't know at all; other times I go "Awww, no." It doesn't matter that I never met the person or really knew them, I knew how their work had affected my life and that made them special to me. So, along with all their other fans, I grieved at their passing.

There's a dichotomy in all of us that most of us don't realize. We want to be well known so that when we die there are lots of people who will mourn us. We want to be loved by everyone and know we'll be missed. But the price of being well known is to lose our privacy since every movement, every word, every outfit is scrutinized and criticized and commented on. Including many that we don't do. Pictures are taken whether we want them to be or not. Rumours abound, whether true or false, and are taken to be truth anyway. Any problem we try to deal with is blown up and announced to the world.

So our need for privacy fights our need to be loved by everyone. Obviously, many people have a stronger need to be in the spotlight and become famous. Most of us want our privacy or lack the confidence to expose every aspect of our lives to the public and so we don't become famous. But just because we don't have most of the world ready to mourn us when we die doesn't mean we don't have people who will mourn us.

We are a weird species. We live in the moment yet we're driven by future events. Our primary drives are to reproduce, survive, and be remembered. Death preys on our minds no matter how young or old we are. Of course, it becomes more of a conscious awareness as we age but even when we are very young we are still preoccupied with our manner of death. How will I die? How many people will miss me? How will I be remembered? Will anyone remember me?

I know that when I die there will be a small group of people immediately affected - my spouse, child, in-laws, sister and her family, my friends. If word is spread either through an obituary or by word of mouth, there will be other people who will think "That name is familiar" and might remember me from when I worked with them. But the overall number will be less than a hundred, mostly because it's been a while since I worked and people forget co-workers after a couple of years.

Which is fine with me.

I know my husband thinks the world should mourn when I die. He thinks that they don't know just how special a person they will be losing. I think he has an overblown appreciation of me but that's okay, because he loves me. :)

One of the reasons we are drawn towards being famous is so that we can influence other people. I know I like to think that I have influenced some people over the years. that I've helped people to open their eyes and really see the world and how their actions, reactions, and thinking have been driven by other people and not their own choices. I know I have shown one person at least how to be more objective and not assume that another viewpoint is correct without checking out the facts himself. So I haven't influenced thousands of people but one person can influence another who can influence another who can influence another, etc. So, given enough time, I might have influenced hundreds of people without ever meeting them.

And in the end, isn't that the best memorial a person can have?