Jerry Garcia Damn, no more Dead shows, sniff. An end of an era.
Phil Hartman
John Lennon
Joe Strummer
Bobby Kennedy
Spike Milligan. And funnily enough, I couldn’t stand The Goon Show. 
But the day I heard that Spike had died, I cried a few tears. The world has few enough people who make us laugh for laughter’s sake.
Born in '61, I was too young to feel the impact of JFK and too old for Kurt Cobain. But John Lennon’s death hit me with both barrels. Most people found out via Howard Cosell; I heard it from a Charlottesville, VA deejay. I’d just bought the LP of Double Fantasy a day or two earlier and was, really, reading the Playboy Interview with him at the time of the announcement.
I kind of overdosed on Beatles music for the rest of that winter, to the point that there are no Beatles tunes on my I-Pod (although I do have Ringo’s live Anthology on there).
Freddie Mercury.
Not only do many (including myself) consider him the greatest male rock vocalist of all time, but he had such an incredible zest for life that I couldn’t help but be jealous of his attitude. Freddie had a lot more music to make, and proved it by recording vocals up until his illness made it physically impossible to do so.
Though this November will mark fifteen years since his death, certain Queen songs still get me choked up if they hit me at the right time.
Andre Norton’s books helped me through my childhood and adolescence. She lived a good long life, but still she went too soon. I have a necklace that she made, to remember her by. I also donate money and materials to a local animal shelter in her memory.
On the celebrity side, it’s definitely Jim Henson, and I can directly attribute the intensity of my grief to a People magazine article I read, many months after his death, in a beauty shop while waiting for my perm to process. When he died, I had heard few of the details. But in the article about his life and death, I learned so much more about him, and the fact that he died quite unneccessarily from pnuemonia because of his own reluctance to get medical help was so sad. But what really sent me over the edge, and is the image that still makes me weep when I think about the loss of this talented man, is the sympathy card that Disney studios sent, depicting Mickey Mouse with his arm around Kermit, comforting him. Don’t know why this affects me so deeply, but I’m starting to tear up just writing this.
On the personal side, the death of my friend Linda at age 38 from a brain tumor still rips my heart out. She was an incredibly smart woman, and we had been friends for years…since seventh grade. She left behind two toddler boys, one of whom is severely handicapped. At some point during college, Linda decided she was fed up with me about something, and started shutting me out of our group of friends. To this day, no one in the group can tell me what it was I did to annoy her. While we still did the Christmas card thing, and saw each other when the group got together, she would pointedly ignore me for the most part. The last time I saw her was a few weeks before her death at a Christmas party. She was already suffering from the effects of the tumor, though we didn’t know it at the time. She was dealing with her brain-damaged son, and an active preschooler, and was just feeling run down and thought she was battling the flu. Even when she went to her doctor, he thought she was just exhausted. When she collapsed in her home a few days after seeing the doctor, the diagnosis of a brain tumor was a shock. They immediatley drilled a hole in her skull to relieve the pressure, and planned on removing the tumor as soon as she stabilized. When she came out of that short coma and was informed that the prognosis wasn’t good, that she would get surgery in a few days but realistically only had a few months to live, her husband brought the boys to the hospital and they had an ice cream party in her room so that she could say goodbye to them. The surgery was scheduled for about two days hence, but that night she slipped into a coma again, and they operated right away. She died as a result of the post-operative swelling, never having recovered consciousness. The thought that she had those brief hours of alertness where she could see her sons one last time, and the vision of them all sitting on her bed eating ice cream, happily oblivious to the fact that their mommy would die soon, just rips my heart out. What she must have been gong through, and the fear and grief she must have been feeling, not knowing if she’s ever see them again, and worrying about how especially the little one would fare, just overwhelms me each time I think about it. And then there is my own grief that she died with so much left unsaid between us, that I never confronted her about why she had turned against me, and that no one would ever be able to clear up that mystery…my friends all are surprised that it affects me so much still, to this day. Perhaps that is why I get so upset when I don’t get closure about things in my own life. As bad as Linda treated me those twenty years, I still cared about her, and miss her so much.
This was Brandon Vedas? Condolences. That must have been really painful.
In the category “People who died too soon so I didn’t get sad until later that I was never going to meet them”:
Freddie Mercury. I’d give a lot to get to go to a live Queen concert with Freddie Mercury up front. He seemed to live off the fans, to live entirely for the moment when they all cheered and clapped and screamed. I would have loved to see that.
Bill Hicks. I first heard of him through Preacher, then read a little about him, and now I’ve heard a bunch of his recordings. If not for the fact that he would have despised a little toadying fan like me, I would have wanted to talk to him.
Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, both for the same reasons. Geniuses and champions of rational thought. We need more of those.
John Lennon. Sure, he probably wasn’t the deep brooding “all you need is love” disillusioned man I picture in my mind, but whether he was or wasn’t, I would like to exchange words with the guy.
In the category “People I was aware of when they died”:
Olof Palme (prime minister of Sweden, assassinated in 1986; Sweden’s JFK in more ways than one). I was a kid when he got shot, but it still shook my world. It shook everybody’s.
Anna Lindh (Swedish minister of foreign affairs, assassinated in 2003). She was a very popular politician and I admired her. The murder was a senseless, pointless thing perpetrated by a lone nut. It affected Swedish politics greatly; she was widely rumoured to be a shoo-in for the post of prime minister, which would have made her the first woman to reach that post. Her death led the government to declare that the upcoming referendum on our joining the EMU would be deciding rather than advisory. They stuck to it, too.
A friend of mine, who died preventing his girlfriend from committing suicide. I told the story here when it happened. It was unreal. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I talked to many friends who had known him, and none of us could grasp it. Things like that just don’t happen.
I’m sure there are many more in both categories. Damn, I’m all depressed now.
Dale Earnhardt. I still can’t get it out of my mind that the first time he ever backed off the gas to let someone else win a race cost him his life. It was a tragedy that never should have happened.
JFK Jr because we’ll never know what he could have become.
Princess Diana.
I grew up in Boston during the days of Camelot, and the Kennedys untimely deaths made me very sad–John, Robert, and especially JFK Jr. That family has known so much grief.
I also grew up reading Ed McBain, and had some e-mail contact with him before his death last July. I cannot image a life without the new McBain.
Andrea Goff, just about the most intelligent, vivacious person I have ever met. When I was in grad. school, she was an undergraduate, but we took many of the same classes. A few weeks after I saw her last (days before she graduated), she and her father and two sisters were murdered in their home in Maryland. That was eleven years ago this summer, and it still hits me sometimes – not just the terrible circumstances of their deaths, but I’ll be struck by an idea that I know there’s only person I want to discuss it with and not only is she not here, but she’s not exactly, definitely anywhere.
Tabby
“The Show Must Go On,” perhaps? Or “Who Wants To Live Forever?” 
Oh, and another for me: Dimebag Darrell. I was not the biggest Pantera fan in the world, but the guy was just so obviously full of life and excitement. He could not possibly have been taken from the earth in a more shocking or unexpected way. I cried hard when I heard what had happened.
I was afraid to admit it yesterday (I know she has a lot of detractors), but now that someone else has: Princess Diana’s death was one that made me feel a sort of shock & sadness that I’d never felt before, at the time it happened. I’m close to her age, I got married a few months after she did, and we had similar emotional difficulties, so I felt an identification. Combined with the romanticized notion of being rich, beautiful, admired, and getting to wear tiaras & such, I guess it hit me harder than I expected. But I’m over that now, and it seems to be past history.
Now, Freddie Mercury - that’s a loss that I still have moments of "what a damn shame we’ll never hear any new music from him - what a talent to have lost so young!’
Although he died way before I was born, I’ll have to say George Orwell. He died of TB when he was only 46 (Jan. 1950), and less than a year after “1984” was published. Orwell seemed to become stronger as a writer with each book he wrote (more or less). It would have been interesting to see what else he could have written had he lived longer.
My friend Chris. He was my best friend from nursery school through seventh grade. I was the cautious, scared and reserved one and he was the goof with no fear. I loved that guy and I remember him as just a fun character who shocked and delighted me. My father made me skip eighth grade so I had to leave him behind and go to high school. We were still friends after he started attending there too, but not quite the same. By college we were on separate paths but still knew what the other was up to. The summer between his freshman and sophomore years in college he was going to a Memorial Day party when he noticed bruises on his legs. He went to the hospital and was diagnosed with acute leukemia, fell into a coma and died that Friday. I don’t know how close we would have been but I always would have wanted to know how he turned out.
For celebrities, Stan Rogers. There were so many more beautiful songs he could have written.
Yeah, those are the two main ones, although, interestingly, both were actually written by guitarist Brian May. “Who Wants to Live Forever” was recorded in 1986, a year before Freddie found out that he was HIV-positive.
“Dear Friends” from “Sheer Heart Attack” is another one that has a tendency to send tears rolling down my face.
The rest are from “Innuendo” (the last album released while Freddie was alive) and, especially, “Made in Heaven,” the 1995 release that contained his final songs. The title track, along with “Let Me Live,” “It’s a Beautiful Day,” “Heaven for Everyone,” and “Too Much Love Will Kill You” are particularly moving.
Sometimes I think that I’d gladly shave ten or fifteen years from my own potential lifespan if I could trade them to Freddie; that’s how much I adore those, and all of their, songs.
Paleontologist and writer of popular essays on natural history and many other things Stephen Jay Gould. He died a few years ago in his late fifties, much too soon. I liked the way the OP described how his teacher inspired and influenced him; well, Gould did the same for me. Whatever he wrote about, be it the weird sex-life of beetles, or the history of ideas, it gave me an incredible rich feeling.
I’m lucky he wrote the books he did. But although I have all his books, he seemed like such a great person, doing so much in life. I’m sad he can’t live and write any more.
In college (psychology) I was utterly unimpressed with the quality of teaching. Many courses taught the obvious, in wording that obscured and “impressified” the subject rather then explaining and clarifying it. Many other courses were following the latest in fad thinking. At the time, feminism was hot and I followed courses which were basically -badly written- political propaganda. I would have given my right pinky to have a professor like Gould.
Jim Henson
Whoops. I forgot the most emotional of all of them: “These are the Days of Our Lives.”
The closing of that music video (when Freddie, knowing he’s as good as dead, looks into the camera, and sings “I still love you”) was his final take - Freddie’s last appearance on video.
No matter what my mood, I can’t watch the end of that video without tears coming to my eyes.
Can’t really think of anyone, but if pressed for an answer, I’ll go with Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jeff Buckley or Mr. Rodgers.
Pretty good band, there, too.