Yesterday, as soon as I heard that Alexander McQueen was dead, my first reaction was to make this joke on Twitter:
The Queen is dead…. (damn fuzzy radio)
It was also my reaction to make a joke when Michael Jackson died, when John Hughes died, when JD Salinger died, oh and pretty much when any other famous person you care to mention died.
Which to many people makes me an unfeeling prick. And that is fine.
The simple fact is that I don’t know these famous people who have died. I may know their work, or have grown up surrounded by their image and their achievements, but I don’t actually know them. For me, in the real hands-on, meat-and-two-veg, interactive world, they never really existed. So their death doesn’t have a huge effect. So I cannot feel truly, personally upset when they die.
And frankly, I find the kind of emotive hand-wringing and professions of grief that other people express all over social media these days a bit weird.
When Princess Diana died quite a few people (mainly, I must admit, women) around me seemed genuinely upset. Even though they did not know her, approve of her privilege or politics, did not believe in the royal family or ever express affection for her when she was alive. The same happened with Alexander McQueen, and I can only assume that in both cases people wished to identify their grief as a way to identify with the person who has died.
Alexander McQueen was undoubtedly a great designer. He was cool, young, creative and exciting. So, it is no wonder that people wish to align themselves with him. But to do so by expressing an apparently real emotional pain over the death of a stranger seems a little odd.
Suicide is always sad. Like Kenneth Williams said, life is like a coach trip and when people start getting off it makes you wonder whether you really want to be on board. If and when someone I know takes their own life I am shocked and saddened and all the rest of it.
But it would be a lie to say I felt the same when someone I’ve never met takes their own life. I’m shocked, of course. But I’m not truly sad in the way that others on Twitter, Facebook et al seem to be.
So, instead, I make jokes. And frankly, people have been making jokes about death for as long as people have been dying. It is an important way of facing death, but carrying on living anyway.
So when The Queen finally does die, I’ll be the one cracking a joke. And that is fine.
Nell Frizzell
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