Those Bright Sparks Burning Out

I had a new thought about death today. Or maybe it's really about aging.

My friends may think I dwell on aging--obsess, even--because about 100 times a day I mention that I don't like it. So fine, if they want to call that "dwelling on" it, let them. I just hate this whole growing old thing. The physical aging part. The wrinkles, the aches, the disappearing eyebrows (why is this one for women only?). You know the list. In contrast, I like the psychic aging. Gaining wisdom (anyway, enough to know I don't know anything). Gaining self-knowledge. Gaining perspective.

But back to death. The new realization I have refers to "celebrity death," for lack of a better term. The pantheon of actors and singers and politicians I grew up with are dying off. The inevitability of death seems stronger as their stars twinkle out. I know, I know. If something is inevitable, how can it be more inevitable? But there it is. They were alive to us, and then they died. Elizabeth Taylor, Esther Williams, Nelson Mandela, Mike Wallace, Jack Lemmon. 
It's "What, you, too? You died?" Even George Burns--and he offered such hope for kicking the habit. 

This inevitability of death thing doesn't apply to the young deaths, the deaths that sock us in the gut with their untimeliness. Marilyn, Elvis, Janis Joplin, John Denver, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Philip Seymour Hoffman. (And I'm all too well aware that my sense of "untimely" has changed as I've aged. I once thought age 60 was pretty old--time to die. Now 70 is untimely. Give me another decade and age 80 will rock my world.)

As I grow older death seems closer. As it should. As it is. But it seems closer as the light of these people flickers out.