This will probably break out into generational groupings and that’s fine.
Outside of family members and close friends and classmates, whose death came as the most shocking and with the most direct impact on your own life?
If you can recall the details of where you were and what you were doing at the time you learned of this death, feel free to add those impressions to your response.
In my case, it would have to be JFK. I was at lunch in a little cafe that was half a block from where I’d seen him in a parade less than two months earlier.
Others that came close:
Elvis
Buddy Holly
Paul Desmond – alto sax playing member of Dave Brubeck Quartet
Chet Baker – jazz trumpet player
Miles Davis
Robert Mitchum – even though he was old and sick
Princess Di
Robert Kennedy
Martin Luther King, Jr.
And I’m willing to bet that I’ll want to say “Oh, yeah. Sure. Him, too or Her, too.” as soon as one of you posts a new name.
I’d say Robert Heinlein for personal reasons but he was elderly and had been in declining health for many years so, while it was a blow to the chest, it couldn’t really be called a surprise.
Being young as I am the only one that comes immediately to mind is Douglas Adams in 2001. I was 17 and had just finished the first few Hitchhikers books and was starting to really get into his stuff when I heard about his death.
I don’t know if this counts, but when the Challenger exploded. All I could think of was that poor teacher and that her class and parents were watching the lift off.
Probably Isaac Asimov. He died when I was three, but I didn’t find out until I was ~17 and had read a lot of his books. It was shocking; This guy wrote so much, and died in my lifetime, but I’ll never have the chance to meet him or thank him for his work.
Helen Keller. I had read everything I could about her and Annie Sullivan (everything written for a child that is; I was only 9 when she died) and I had somehow imagined that someday I’d get a chance to meet her. I was devastated when I read that she died and shocked that she was so old. I had pictured her in my mind as forever the young college graduate I’d seen in a picture.
And Princess Di as well. Nearly my age, with two sons around the age of my sons and with a train wreck of a life, I’d always felt sorry for her but never expected her to die so young.
You’ve prompted me to mention a couple of others whose deaths came before I was even aware of their lives.
First would be James Dean. I remember somebody in my Sunday School class mentioning “some guy” who was “killed in a car wreck in a movie” in what would probably have been late 1955. It was the next spring before I saw Rebel Without A Cause and I can’t really remember if I knew Dean was dead when I saw the movie. I must have known because I remember thinking how tragic it was to be watching a young man on the screen who seemed so promising and full of life. By the time Giant came out I was already a rabid fan and joined what must have been thousands of kids my age seeing that movie on opening day.
The other would be Duane Allman. I got into the Allman Brothers by way of a co-worker and it was after I had decided there was finally something in Rock that I could really relate to, that I learned of Duane’s and Berry Oakley’s deaths years earlier. There really wasn’t any shock involved with that news, just sadness and a sense of loss.
It was Princess Di for me. I was stuck sitting in my car waiting for some friends after work when I flipped to an AM station and heard their breaking news about a possible car crash she was in just half an hour earlier in Paris. I am still convinced I was one of the first people around in the U.S. that heard about it. I couldn’t find anything else about it for another 90 minutes.
I went out drinking with my friends that night and we were drunk and ended up at a sit-down place with silent TV overheard late in the night. A steady image on the TV caught our eye with the banner or her birth and death year right below it. The girls with us got quite upset (probably because they were drunk) so I remember the time and place quite well.
A sad commentary on my emotional life, perhaps – but as a matter of shock (“omigod, you’re kidding, I can’t believe it”): Princess Di, closely followed by JFK Jr.
JFK, I was in third grade: I had no particular expectations about how the world worked. MLK, RFK – it was the '60s, man, people got shot. (Note, I was upset about these deaths, but not particularly “shocked.”)
But for both Di and JFK Jr. – they were young and healthy, they were handsome, they were larger than life – how could they suddently just not be there? I was truly shocked by both of those deaths.
I don’t recall any celebrity deaths as having really shocked me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had a couple of close brushes with death myself and I realise that shit happens. But planned murders are a different matter. 9/11 and the Brighton Bomb stand out.
Steve Irwin. I mean… logically, it wasn’t surprising at all that a critter finally bit back, but he’d been wrangling animals for so many years and filmed so many television shows, and he was always okay–I just assumed that he always would be okay. It was so sudden, too.