Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I was a huge fan of the TV show “thirtysomething,” which chronicled the lives of a Big Chill-ish group of friends (depending on your point of view, either whiny self-absorbed yuppies or people eerily similar to you and your own friends).  In the third season, one of the main characters, Nancy, is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, setting off a long series of episodes showing how she grappled with the physical and emotional repercussions of both the disease and her treatment.

The show’s creators chose to give no foreshadowing that a major character was about to receive such a life-changing bit of news, so I was stunned while watching the show as usual one night to hear Nancy’s doctor tell her that she had cancer.  But I was even more shocked to find myself sobbing and distraught at the fate of an entirely fictional character.  

What made my extreme reaction even more striking was the fact that a co-worker of mine, Lila, had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, and a younger friend, Catherine, was anxiously awaiting the results of her own breast biopsy.  I hadn’t cried for Lila and I was concerned but not really thinking that much about Catherine’s pending results.  So the question arose:  Why was I feeling for Nancy what I hadn’t felt for them?

I’ve never been one to over-invest in characters on TV shows or in movies. Much as I enjoy both, I’ve always remained aware that I’m watching a mere facsimile of life. If anything has sucked me into an emotional relationship with a fictional character, it would be books, which have always spoken to my imagination most powerfully.  But I hadn’t felt that kind of intense connection to a literary character since adolescence.

Yet here I was, recently turned thirtysomething myself, weeping for a woman that not only I didn’t know, but who didn’t actually exist.

One explanation was that I felt that I did know Nancy, as can happen with a skillfully-drawn fictional character.  Actors often say their fans feel this way, especially TV actors, whose characters become almost as real as neighbors by appearing in people’s homes week after week. But if that were true for me, I’d have had “the Nancy reaction” more often.

And so the obvious answer came to mind:  I cried for Nancy instead of crying for Lila and Catherine.  

I cried for her because I couldn’t cry for them, couldn’t face my sadness and fear about their situations, and felt helpless about knowing what to do.  It was safe to cry for Nancy, and my tears brought relief for an anxiety and grief that I hadn’t even known I was feeling.

And yet this wasn’t a breakthrough that opened up my feelings towards my real friends – instead it was a reaction that I kept to myself, a release that paradoxically kept my feelings contained, safely directed towards a fantasy friend rather than being fully felt towards a real one.


Because of this experience, as I’ve watched the public outpouring of intense grief over the deaths of famous people – such as Princess Diana and now Michael Jackson – I've come to wonder:  What are people really grieving when someone famous dies?  

Most often the answer offered at these times is that public deaths remind us not just of our own mortality, but that of family and friends we actually know and love.  We’re touching death, remembering it’s real, and that life is a gift that can be taken away at any time.

Put in those terms, the grief over public figures is healthy and beneficial, a way to beat back the denial of death that permeates American culture in particular (with its emphasis on youth and extending your life as long as possible).  It’s a reality check, a submission to the fragility of life, a humbling of our usual headlong tumble through our days as if they had no end.

But I’ve come to think it’s just the opposite.  

I think that focusing on the death of famous people means that we don’t have to think about our own deaths, which loom inevitably in the not-too-distant future.  

It’s a psychological feint to fool our minds, like the sleight-of-hand of a magician to get us to look away from the real business lest we see what the trick entails.  And it's possible that this mental maneuver is actually life-saving:  Without such tricks, perhaps we’d suffer from such a paralyzing awareness of our own mortality that it would cripple our ability to enjoy life – certainly some people feel that, in depression and other states (as well as in Woody Allen movies).

I have a friend who spent many years as a psychotherapist primarily treating children who had been sexually abused, an unimaginably tough job.  And during that time, she became a fan of horror movies, which she rented and watched many nights after work, causing me to wonder if she was trying to distract herself from the real-life horror stories that she heard every day in her office.  Better to feel the tingle of terror safely on the small screen, after all, then to dwell on the stories of what small children had endured.  

Scary stories in fact are thought to serve that purpose for humans in general – to provide a safe catharsis of nameless fears that lurk inside all of us.  But in no way do they help us identify or confront those fears directly – they instead perform their psychic hygiene on some unconscious level.

When someone famous dies, do we really confront death – our own death?  Or do we make it someone else’s problem, someone else’s fate?  After all, Michael Jackson has died, but I haven’t.  Hearing the news, we simply put death in the same container we always do:  Something That Happens To Other People.

The show “thirtysomething” played on this very assumption, making headlines for a shocking switcheroo they pulled after depicting Nancy’s fight with cancer through many moving episodes.  As both she and the viewers anxiously await the results of a “second look” surgery she’s had to determine if her cancer treatment has worked, another character, Gary, is unexpectedly killed in an accident on the way to see her at the hospital, a fact that Nancy finds out just after learning that she’s now cancer-free.  As our local TV columnist put it in a headline about the show the next day:  “Nancy OK; Gary KO’d.”  Or as Nancy herself says in that episode, “It wasn’t supposed to be him.  It was supposed to be me.”

Death sometimes sneaks up and taps you on the shoulder.  And when that happens, you can’t change the channel.

Catherine's breast biopsy fortunately turned out to be negative.  But my co-worker Lila died of a very aggressive cancer 18 months after her diagnosis, which was made after she'd discovered a golf ball sized tumor in her breast, a mere 6 months after she’d had a clear mammogram. 

At her funeral, I still couldn’t find my tears.

(Photo "Cause of Death:  Deferred" taken by me

from TV image of MJ news coverage)