Shamsi

I knew I was upset yesterday when I heard Farrah Fawcett died. Although it was expected, I was saddened and felt the loss of it. Later when I learned that Michael Jackson died (which was not expected) I suddenly felt a hole in the center of my being.

It’s odd, I am not, nor have I ever been one to follow trends, go with the crowd (I’ve never even read an Ann Rice novel???) Yet, yesterday I felt it, last night I dreamt all around it and this morning I woke up sad.

Two icons, two of the “beautiful people” of my youth, whose faces I saw constantly on posters in my friends’ rooms and on billboards, on television, everywhere, are gone.

As a final note, because I’m still not sure how to process these feelings, I stopped to get ‘consoling’ doughnuts on the way into work and heard my first song of the day, Elton John’s “Can you feel the love tonight.” It seemed overwhelmingly appropriate.

And can you feel the love tonight
It is where we are
It’s enough for this wide-eyed wanderer
That we got this far
And can you feel the love tonight
How it’s laid to rest
It’s enough to make kings and vagabonds
Believe the very best

Post script – Friday night after returning home, I spoke with Shelly about this.  We both felt the void…the completely empty space and then I had the vision of what it *really* felt like:  When one person’s energy takes up so much space in the world and then suddenly vanishes from this reality, it is not disimilar to a lightning strike, blazing through the air, then in a flash, it is gone, leaving a void that allows the air to colapse back in on itself causing thunder.  That’s what loosing these childhood icons felt like, like the reverberation of an extremely loud thunderclap.