Age of the Geek

 
Luminous beings are we
  
     Last week I said we made it. It turns out I spoke too soon. 2016 had one last tragedy in store for us.
     Two days before Christmas, Carrie Fisher suffered a heart attack while on a transatlantic flight. Two days after Christmas, still hospitalized in intensive care, she passed on. To make matters worse, she was followed shortly by her mother, Debbie Reynolds.
     If you are a movie lover, odds are that you've enjoyed at least one of their performances over the last seventy years. In a year that has already seen the loss of Gene Wilder, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Prince, and Florence Henderson (to say nothing of Harper Lee, Nancy Reagan, Muhammad Ali, and John Glenn), the loss of Fisher and Reynolds punctuates the end of a year of great loss for pop culture icons.
     On just the Star Wars front alone, not only did we lose Princess Leia, but Kenny Baker, who operated R2-D2 from within and Erik Bauersfeld, the voice of Admiral Ackbar, also died this year.
     Now, celebrities die every year. So do non-celebrities for that matter. It's not as though we all became immortal when the ball dropped to ring in 2017. I honestly don't know if celebrity deaths have actually seen an uptick this year, but if they haven't, the reaction to them certainly has. A GoFundMe raised more than $2,000 to protect Betty White from 2016. (Betty White is, as of this writing, perfectly fine. The money will be donated to charity.)
     It seems silly, but it makes a sort of sense. Death is inevitable, but it looks like society has had its collective fill.
     I always feel conflicted about celebrity deaths. It feels wrong, somehow, to grieve for a person you didn't really know and who didn't know you.
     I can talk about how I'll miss Carrie Fisher lug her dog around on interviews. I can talk how admirable Fishers life was, not only from the impact that Princess Leia had on pop culture, but from her own triumphs over drug abuse and mental disorders. Both on and off the screen, Fisher was an inspiration to people everywhere and the world is poorer without her.
     But any loss felt by her fans pales in comparison to what her friends and family must be going through. How can one mourn a fictional character when Billie Lourd spent her Christmas experiencing the last days of both her mother and grandmother?
     In the grand scale of things, mourning a celebrity seems petty and trivial. Real people lost a real loved one last week. It seems wrong to co-opt that sense of loss for a person you didn't really know.
     After all, let's not pretend that celebrity worship isn't a social problem. For every person inspired by Fisher's struggles there's somebody out there convinced that vaccines cause autism because Jenny McCarthy told them so. Likewise, the same fame that draws people to movies starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also results in an obsession over their personal life as though it's anybody's business how they spent their Christmas.
     So should celebrity deaths be off limits too? Do we have any right to mourn people we didn't know?
     On the other hand, loss isn't a zero sum situation.
     Nobody would suggest that a Star Wars fan's sense of loss is equal to that of Fisher's friends and family, but that doesn't make it completely invalid. Whether she had a personal relationship with her fans or not, Fisher was loved by millions. Whether they knew her personally or not, Fisher did have an impact on people's lives. These people did lose something and there is a place for that kind of grief.
     I suppose, as usual, it's just a matter of moderation.
     In the video game, "Star Wars: The Old Republic" players spent last week holding a virtual wake on the planet Alderaan. That seems like a fair and fitting tribute.
     Everybody deals with death in their own way. The best thing to do is to live and let live.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes for a less traumatic 2017.