Why do we mourn passing of people we never knew?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Why do we mourn the deaths of famous people we’ve never met?

Why, for example, did thousands take to the streets of Belfast to see George Best off on his final journey – or most famously of all, why did Britain come to a standstill to mourn Princess Diana?

We can all remember where we were when JFK or John Lennon was shot – and for most of us, it was nowhere near either Dallas or New York. We remember the news the night that Elvis died on the toilet.

And we might have shed a tear and remembered these people we never met.

So what is it about celebrity that leaves us thinking we know them, when the reality is that most of them would sooner drive over you than stop and chat?

Perhaps it’s the joy some of them brought to our lives – Bestie jinking past defenders like they were stationary dust bins, or JFK looking out over Galway Bay towards the land of his birth and the place where so many of ours made their home.

The death of sports heroes – either current or from bygone days – evokes a vision of them in their prime, thrilling us with their skills.

Ditto for rock stars – we have their music to remember them by; and if it made an impression on us at a formative time in our lives, then it will trigger an emotional response on their death.

But then you have wall-to-wall coverage for the passing of minor celebrities, people that you wouldn’t have gone into town to see in their relative pomp – and yet their passing, probably premature, makes headlines.

Take the recent death of Peaches Geldof – a tragic death in the way that the loss of any young mother would be, but in fairness to a woman famous for being a daughter, hardly the sort of thing to dominate the headlines.

Yes, her father Bob is a national treasure and one of the few people of our time to make a real and tangible difference in the fight against world hunger. Bur Peaches was a wild child who was famous for having something to say about everything while never really doing a lot about anything.

And yet we had pages and programmes on her death, laden with reminders of her mother’s tragic death – another woman most of us never knew – as well as endless pieces on the evil of drugs just so you could drag all of that salacious detail into the picture too.

Mickey Rooney died earlier this year after a long and fruitful life – not to mention eight wives over his 94 years – but the images we remember were of him as a child actor back in the days of black and white cinema….Boys Town in 1938, the Andy Hardy series from that same era. So we were mourning a man who died within touching distance of his century, with images of him from his late teens.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.