Now, what’s the deal with people saying, “I’m sad” or “this makes me sad” (or of all things “goodnight sweet prince” (gag me with a spoon)).
All right. It might be SAD that he died to his wife and kids.
But, how does someone who only knows an actor through the TV screen get SAD that he died. I get sad when family and friends and pets die. Not when celebrities die. That’s right, I get more sad when my pets die. You know why? Because I actually KNOW them.
If you get sad when Superman dies, what’s left over for your family dying? SUPER-SAD? MEGA-SAD?
And that’s if you even get sad when your family dies. My grandmother was like 80 when she had an aneurysm sitting in her chair and died. It’s not SAD. She was an old lady who died peacefully. Don’t people realize that other people die?
Not to mention. . .what’s sad is sitting in a wheelchair without the use of your limbs while infections rot through your skin, your bones, and your organs.
What’s sad is that he paralyzed himself while playing silly rich boy games when he had familial responsibilities.
IMHO, death was a relief for this guy and his family.
I am sad as in “concern for a fellow human being” sad but it’s not that big a deal. C Reeve enjoyed a successful life for quite some time, and injured himself doing something rather frivolous. 50 is too young to die, but it happens to lots of other people even younger, out of the blue, through no fault of their own–and they never get to be movie stars.
~
My first thought was a little feeling of joy that his death happened right before the election, so maybe people who were on the fence about stem cell research will be swayed by emotion into voting for a candidate that doesn’t rabidly oppose it. I think that makes me a really bad person.
I feel that it is a sad thing, but do I feel sad myself? No. I would have liked to see whether he ended up taking some steps, and that’s disappointing.
I don’t know how you get through the day. Here’s a few more for ya.
Ken Caminiti, the National League’s most valuable player in 1996 but an admitted steroid user in his playing days and a cocaine user in recent years, died Sunday in the Bronx. He was 41.
Dr. Jeffrey S. Schechner, an associate professor of dermatology at Yale who led research into how to produce a better artificial skin for grafting, died on Sept. 7 in New Haven. He was 39.
A 24-year-old man was fatally shot yesterday afternoon outside a West
Baltimore apartment building - the latest of three weekend homicides
reported by city police.
Donte R. Taylor of the 2400 block of W. Cold Spring Lane was standing
outside an apartment building in the 2400 block of Winchester St.
about 3:30 p.m. when an unknown assailant shot him several times in
the upper body, police said.
David Ames, 39, was standing outside his home in the 600 block of N.
Woodington Road about 7:30 p.m. when an unknown assailant shot him
several times in the upper body, police said. Ames died a short time
later at Shock Trauma.
Sheronda Butcher, 30, was standing in the front room of her house in
the 800 block of N. Fulton Ave. about 4 a.m. when someone fired a shot
through her front window. Butcher, who suffered a chest wound, died at
the scene, police said.
Lawrence A. Funke, a chemist and research grant administrator at the American Chemical Society in Washington, died of an aneurysm Oct. 5 at Howard County General Hospital. The Clarksville resident was 55.
Not particularly. I feel sympathy for his family, and felt badly for him when he was injured, but it’s my understanding that most people in his situation have a shortened life span. A childhood friend of mine was paralyzed from the waist down when a jeep he was in flipped over. The other four soldiers in the vehicle were fairly unscathed. He’s gone through a lot of shit from it, but it’s in ways left him a better person, even if his path was different than he’d planned. Christopher Reeves was in the same boat. He chose to do good things with his situation, and for that I salute him. Remembering people by celebrating the good they did in their life is a better way to go.
I dunno. I’ve always seen him as Superman. You know, he’s the comic book hero. And its sad. Because as a kid, everyone has always imagined themselves (at some point) as being Superman.
So in some ways, I probably feel sad because its like watching a legend die.
(Yes, yes… no need to quote the Death of Superman issue)
I’m only going to address this one part; too many of your questions belong in Great Debates and your statements in the Pit.
Celebrities are a part of our lives, as are the Empire State Building, Massachusetts, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Jimmy Choo shoes. You may not personally see them, but they’re a part of our everyday world, and if they vanished, yeah, you’d be sad and a bit bereft. Let’s say, too, you hate Jimmy Choo shoes, and you hate Jerry Lewis. You might be secretly delighted at the demise of them.
But pulling that “ooooh, how can people care about celebrities?” cultural snobbery just doesn’t wash.
I was “sad” when I heard about Christopher Reeve’s death (and certain other celebrity deaths) in that I felt a little bit down to hear that news, as I’d been hearing he was having better progress and I hoped he’d walk again. When my father died unexpectedly in his sleep in his early 50s, on the morning he was to see me at college for the first time in a couple months, I sobbed my heart out. I put my grief under tight control and was “the strong one” for my sister and my mother, so that someone could deal with the funeral director and be sure we weren’t being overcharged for anything, and so that someone would be able to write out the thank-you-for-thinking-of-us notes afterwards without falling apart constantly. I grieved on and off for weeks, and after a couple years, it became possible to think of things like “I wish my dad had been alive to see me graduate from college/get married” without breaking down crying. And yeah, sure, some of that was grief for myself and my feelings, but also for his life cut short.
In other words, I think a fair number of human beings manage to have a whole range of emotion and behavior that can fit under the word “sad,” and either your experience of “sad” is far more limited than that of the rest of our species, or you’re just amusing yourself by claiming to be above such things, unlike the rest of us unreasonable people.
Your list of random people won’t resonate with most here as we’d never encountered them in any form - reading their work, meeting them over coffee, etc. I admired Reeve’s spirit and dedication to his cause. I felt mildly sad when a highly reknowned researcher at my alma mater died, as I admired his groundbreaking work and he was a brilliant person. I was kind of sad when Mr. Rogers died, as I’d grown up watching his supportive, educational show, and later on learned about the dedicated instructor that he was. And so on.
I was a bit sad. I was somewhat sadder when Rodney Dangerfield died, because I enjoyed his work more, which sounds selfish perhaps, when written out so plainly.
I feel ZERO when a celebrity dies. I start thinking of jokes and wondering how long I have to wait to tell them and if I’m in the right crowd.
I don’t delight in the dying of the ones I don’t like and I feel no sadness in the dying of the ones I do like.
I think that you write books about celebrities (right?) so I might guess you do form some further attachment to celebs. Now I don’t say this like it’s a superior attitude, but they’re like fictional characters to me. They are objects on a screen there for my amusement.
Michael J. Fox has Parkinsons. Whatever. I guess I won’t be seeing him in much now. I wonder if they’ll make a role for a guy with Parkinsons.
Rodney Dangefield died. Well, he was funny, but he didn’t seem to have anything funny left to say anyway.
Schwartzenegger became governor. I wonder if he’ll do any more action movies.
Ray Lewis is going to jail. How will this affect my fantasy football league?
I hear where you’re coming from, but it’s a fine line. I could honestly care less about 99% of celebs. Like most people I’ve had my occaisonal brushes with them. I used to work at a shop at a bike shop on the upper east side of NY, and JFK jr. would stop in fairly frequently. I was always amazed how the entire store would just freeze in his presence. To me, he was just another guy with shitty coffee breath. Now the other extreme is to go out of your way to hate someone just because who they are. So my point is I think it’s equally lame to care too much about a dead celeb, or not to care one iota about them.
Yes, I am sad. From what I hear of him, he was intelligent and fairly a nice guy. I’m sad that we have to lose good people like him and horrible people keep living. I’m also sad, because whether people think it or not, he was a small part of my life.
I was mroe sad when Rodney died, as he was a larger part of my life. Why shoudn’t I feel a twinge?