When Famous People Die

When Famous People Die ©

By Michael Casey

I’ve just come in from cleaning our front door step, some nice person let their dog pooh all over it, and my daughter stood in it as we left for the school run. Such is life, events happen and you have to deal with them. I looked at the news on the Internet and saw that James Horner had died, never heard of him, then I read the detail below, we have all heard of him or his music. He wrote the music for Braveheart and Titanic amongst other things.

So it got me thinking, how would you or me be remembered? If at all. There are a couple of graveyards down the road from our house, my daughter said she wouldn’t put me in there but in a private graveyard, or she’d have me cremated and put in her plant pots so I could help her flowers grown. Sweet and innocent love from an 11 year old.  I believe Scottie from Star Trek  was blasted into space, or rather his ashes, James Horner did the music for one of the Star Trek films as well.

A famous person dies and it’s all over the news, there may even be a competition for top death spot on the news. Christopher Lee beat Ron Moody for top spot on the death news, why, because Dracula had more in him, or rather more films made. I read somewhere a long time ago that the newspapers and the tv people have ready-made obituaries, an off the shelf, ready-made death notice. So IF your name is on that kind of list you know you have arrived, you have made it, because your obituary is ready, reassuring that isn’t it? Things do go wrong though, Robert Morley’s death was announced and his son Sheridan was interviewed, but his dad was still alive and kicking. Then there is Mark Twain who’s death was announced when he had not shuttled off this mortal coil, you can Google the famous quotation for yourselves.

He was a right bastard, a mean bugger, never had the time of day for him. Then months later after his pauper’s burial you discover he had made millions on the stock market and left it all to charity. Does your attitude to the deceased change immediately, or do you think the bastard should have left his cash to you, so you could invest it down the bar of the Black Swan. Then there is the case of Jimmy Saville, an “angel” turned into a devil after death.

Death is the great leveller,  books are written, tv shows are shown, retrospectives are held in museums and art galleries. You get 360 degrees of information, good, bad and downright sad. So that is why he or she did that, that’s why they were so driven, that’s why they loved so much. We though he was so happy, but he hid his broken heart. We though he was such a bastard, but he was just defending himself from emotional hurt. He had a secret lover, he must have been a right dirty bastard, but we didn’t know his wife told him to take a lover because of this or that.

You only know what comes from a glimpse, from a crack in the curtain, from a random meeting in the supermarket, even stars have to buy milk for their cat. You can only know what a person is like by living with them, to experience with them. He looks great, I bet he’s great in the sack, I bet she’s explosive in bed. But it could be the total opposite, curlers and cocoa in bed with a book and the pussy purring besides her.

The true test for famous people when they die is whether you go “ah” when you hear it on the news, if you say “ah” then their lives have touched your life. My mother was asked to go to the graveyard with the priest a few times, somebody had died and was being given a pauper’s funeral. I featured this in my novel The Butcher The Baker and The Undertaker. So it was just mum and the priest and the undertaker. Mum would get a lift back home in the jump seat of the hearse as our house was close to the undertakers.

In my comic novel Joan Derby has a jazz funeral and 100s turn up for that lost soul. When my own mother died we had 5 priests on the altar and the church was rammed with 100s of people, real people who knew her. She was not famous at all, but every lost soul who was in Heaven rushed to greet her on her funeral day. She had prayed at their grave now was the time to thank her.