Celebrity deaths are weird. Before the Internet, we had, essentially, one way to know people we hadn't actually met. Everybody knew the subject in the same way, knew the same details collectively.

I'm hearing comparisons between Michael Jackson's death and that of Elvis. For me, it more closely echoes Princess Diana's: youth, suddenness and the collective shock of a nation. The world.

I'm sorry to say I didn't get his music. (Unless you count the remade "Rockin' Robin." Now, there was a song.) But I understand the grief. All too well, friends.

Ask me to name the last day of my youth, and it's easy: December 8, 1980.

At 13, 14, 15, I lived a constricted life. But found a window--not to look, but to listen through. Would it sound dramatic to say I was Dorothy in black-and-white Kansas before I landed, somehow, in the color factory of Pepperland?

What I didn't know, couldn't know, was that my overgrown love for the music of the Beatles and, specifically, John Lennon was not teenage hero worship so much as obsession. At my school library, each lunch hour, I photocopied Beatle-related magazine articles from the '60s and '70s. Two hundred twenty-five pages in all. Wrote to John (and Yoko, figuring that might increase my chance for a response*) perhaps weekly, sent cards on Lennon family birthdays, hung out in front of the Dakota, album in hand. Talked--good heavens--talked about little else.

Every Beatle movie (including myriad documentaries), every book, fan zine, convention....The Beatles Illustrated History? Two copies: one to keep intact, the other to cut the pictures out of. Pictures. Every-freakin'-where. More than a hundred in my tiny dorm room the night he died.

Lennon revealed his pain plainly--but also disguised it as humor and machismo. Female though I was, I did the same. I understood.

At age 14 and in a bad situation, I trained myself against emotion. Which was hard because, you know, the only people I ever knew who were more emotional than I was were my mother and my father. But at about 16, the first time I heard "Plastic Ono Band," at my friend Jill's apartment, I came home and cried. My mom asked what was wong, and I told her that John Lennon's mother had died.

"Oh; I'm sorry. When did this happen?"

"When he was only 16 years old!"

And so that weirdly warm December night some three years later, when my friends who had given me the news had gone, my inner voice said something strange: You realize you're going to have to cry about this, don't you? It was maybe a full minute before I could, and I didn't stop, really, for about a year, all of a year.

It was hard to accept that people in the streets continued to go about their business, as if there were a point. Hard to believe that my hair was still growing, and I still felt hunger. That was how it felt. I was 19, just.

For whatever it may be worth, I'm probably a better person. Every hurdle made me less insufferable. Spitting sadness and bitterness back as humor had made me cutting and mean (if amusing and artistic), much like my murdered hero. (However, I was far less adored!)

I resolved never to learn personal things about any other living artist I admired. Whether your masterwork was born of heartbreak or a subway ride: whatever. Neither do I care about your kooky religion or whom you're dating.

I've more-or-less held to this. Of course, it couldn't be helped in the case of Steve Irwin. To watch "The Crocodile Hunter" was to get to know its star.

I admired Irwin for reasons quite opposite my youthful Beatle worship. He was everything I wasn't: Unfailingly brave and genuine. (Neither am I tall nor blonde.)

While his surprising death saddened me, however, it hardly turned my world on its head. Youth can end just once for each of us.

*Wrong-o.