It's been a rockier than ever ride this year – filled with disasters, both natural and man-made, lots of sorrow and not much hope that things will get any better. In fact, they look like they might get worse. We, here in the US, are in the midst of the presidential primaries, and that hoary proverb about the gods first making mad those whom they wish to destroy seem to very apt. And just last week, an unexpected death shook fans of old Hindi films. Sadhana, that gorgeous actress of the silver screen, passed away on Christmas Day, leaving thousands of her grieving fans behind. Why do the deaths of our idols leave us bereft? It’s not as if we knew them personally, nor are we their friends. Yet, we feel an inexplicable connection to the roles they play on screen, and invest them perhaps with all the virtues of those characters. We see in them our own siblings, or our parents, or our own true loves. They are ours, they belong to us, their audience, their fans. They are family.
When they die, they leave behind only a kaleidoscope of images, frozen forever in our memories – images of them as we knew them when, young and beautiful and ageless… and we grieve for what they were, and what they meant to us, and their loss hits us hard – perhaps because their deaths make us aware of our own mortality.
Life goes on, however, and despite it all, or perhaps because of it, people, ordinary people, put up their chins and get back to the process of living. And even if the humour is grim, they even manage to laugh. As the saying goes, the show must go on. Indeed, it will. Whether we go on or not. Because, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
‘This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
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