When I was thirteen, I found a boy my age in the woods who shot himself in the head.  It’s in a little “about me” narrative I wrote a few years ago found on this blog.  It used to say his full name, and eventually both his girlfriend at the time of his death and his sister found me.  It was an incredible experience.  There is a finite number of people who, like me, felt consequences from that moment.

I won’t condemn a person for taking their own life, but I will condemn them for the method they employ to do so.  There are other people involved than just the suicide, and in my case I was hapless.  A kid cutting through the woods to go to the Lane Drugs to buy candy.

Once we overcome the initial, “ZOMG! they’re dead and that’s sad!” reaction to a celebrity death, what are we left with?  To try to figure out what our knowledge of, and interest in, that person means to us now that he or she is gone.  It’s a natural process.

However, there is a knee-jerk reaction to people ruminating about the celebrity life-and-death cycle: give the family privacy.  If nothing is sacred, shouldn’t at least the respect for the privacy of a celebrity’s family be? goes that thinking.

The death of Paul Newman was cause for such hand-wringing.  Lisa Fayed of About.com typified the mock anguish the media, and readers, sometime express when they contemplate the end of a famous person’s life:

I cannot imagine while going through chemotherapy or radiation, people commenting on my prognosis based on how bad or good I looked on any given day. How hurtful those comments must be, whether you are a celebrity and accustomed to the tabloid gossip or just “average Joe”.

I say we give Paul Newman a break. He has lived a wonderful life, giving so much to others through his Newman’s Own Foundation. He deserves privacy, just like we all do.

Leave aside the assumption that the dying are googling themselves, celebrities don’t deserve that kind of privacy.  In other words, the privacy that people are not going to discuss you.  Fascination is not a faucet.  Celebrities have cultivated the public, usually over decades, to breach that privacy with them.

Many commonalities most of us can’t imagine strangers would care to learn about in our lives, tantalize us in the famous.  We follow their clothing, their loves, their friendships, their careers, their thoughts, drug problems, marriages, divorces, awards and causes.  In fact, if the public loses interest in the life of a celebrity, it might be the death of their career.

We examine our own lives through them, but suddenly we are all supposed to avert our eyes when they are dying or dead?  The warm helpings of chastisement when we do not are myopic. They are logically flawed and insult the media machine that has been effective in getting all of us to think about that person, sometimes nonstop, sometimes shaping our entire lives around her.

When David Carradine dies in a bizarre way, bringing to light a sexual practice few of us knew existed before Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, people are going to be interested.   Most of the general public neither knew about the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation nor can they contemplate wanting to try it.

Human mortality and the fragility of life is something we all think about, and how people die and the reasons are cause for scrutiny that have implications for ourselves.  Celebrity deaths are often how we think about our own, and whether we would want to go the same way.

Lucy Gordon – tragic but heartless?

It has been almost a month since Lucy Gordon committed suicide and the answers to this mystery may never come to light.  Why did the rising English actress do it?  I am surprised at how much I have thought about it, and it is not because I photographed her.

I won’t begrudge a person for wanting to kill herself.  Life is difficult for many of us, and nobody should be forced to live in their own skin by a person or government who does not have to do so.

But how a person commits suicide is another story.  All evidence is that Lucy Gordon had family that loved and cared about her.  There are no reports coming out from anyone that she had anything but a loving family.  Lucy also had a boyfriend, the cinematographer Jerome Almeras.   She professed, recently, that she was in love with him.  Even his teenage daughter liked her.

Exacerbating the issue is that Lucy just had a friend commit suicide, which upset her terribly.  So she knew exactly the pain her death would cause for those she left behind.   The night she killed herself, she and Almeras had a spat, according to neighbors.   After he went to bed, she then hung herself in their apartment.

Almeras, the man she loved, woke the next morning to find her hanging and went running down the street screaming in anguish after having to cut her down.  ‘Call the police – my friend has hung herself!’ he cried over and over.  Now, he is left with one of his last experiences with her a quarrel.

There appears to be no evidence of mental instability–outside of the suicide–that could have flagged anyone.  Her father, sister, agent and all of her friends were left groping for answers and signs that things were not okay.  They couldn’t come up with any.

This is a stunning way to end your life, knowing well the pain that you will cause; ensuring the man you love finds you when he wakes and has to cut you down; and nobody having any idea why you did it.

Suicide may not be a selfish act, at least no more so than the desires of people who want you to go on living in pain so that you can inhabit their lives, but how you do it has implications for the sort of person that you are.  How you leave it for people to find you, and the answers you give them, are an indication of whether your death was a selfish act or not.

That  boy I found in the woods has never left me. In the case of Lucy Gordon, I think it was a heartless way to go.

Possibly related posts

• David Carradine death photos are fake? (8)
• David Carradine kills himself in Thailand (1936 – 2009) (3)
• Lucy Gordon suicide remains a mystery to the public (14)
• On Paul Newman and public dying (3)
• The Ballad of Lucy Gordon: actress found dead two days before 29th birthday (5)