365 True Things: 291/Deaths

I hold to that superstition that "deaths happen in threes." For me this week, I'm up to two: David Bowie and Alan Rickman.

My superstitious side (which is very, very weak, but I suppose it's there) is tingling uneasily at the coincidence that both these talented men died of cancer at age sixty-nine. I am sixty-one. Sixty-nine is not that far away.

I don't like it.

David Bowie I was not that close to, though of course he has colored most of my life in a way. Ziggy Stardust was released the year I graduated from high school. So many of his songs are so familiar to me. But I never saw him in concert; I didn't follow him. I've learned more about him in the past couple of days than I ever knew before. Still . . . I feel the loss of an experimenter, an artist, a rule-breaker, a risk-taker, a man filled with life and love.

Perhaps I, who had no particular connection to him, would feel the loss less if he'd died at, oh, eighty-nine. But sixty-nine? That's way too young for someone as electrically creative as him. And good god, the way he went out: creating powerful art right up to the last possible moment. Astonishing. So yeah: I'm one of the millions who are reeling at the news.

So: to learn this morning that Alan Rickman had followed in his wake. I first "met" Mr. Rickman in the movie Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991; dir. Anthony Minghella), which was and remains one of my favorite movies ever. (I just looked on amazon, and for only $210 a copy of it can be mine. It is not available on Netflix. I wonder if it will become available, now.) He was perfect as the villain in Die Hard. Although I saw only one or two of the Harry Potter movies, there could be no other Severus Snape.

Here is the first scene in Truly, Madly, Deeply where he shows up—as Jamie—and reconnects with Juliet Stevenson:

And here is what seems to be the first part of the whole movie. Maybe I can watch it for less than $210. I think I will. I haven't seen it in ages, but back when I used to watch it regularly (yes, I do that, with a few select movies), it made me so happy. And sad. And happy. And sad. And finally, happy.

I'll be waiting now for the third death (which will be of my pantheon, since I know a FB friend of mine has already ticked off her three; I didn't recognize the first). If this third one dies of cancer at age sixty-nine, I'm going to be upping my superstition meter.

RIP David Robert Jones. RIP Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman. And thank you.