Life is ebbing away

I'm 54 years old and I'm dying. I don't have cancer. I don't have heart disease. I don't have any terminal affliction at all. As I was watching a documentary about the making of the 1957 movie Sweet Smell of Success (starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Martin Milner, best known for Adam-12), something I've been feeling for a few years now suddenly became clear. Every time another celebrity from my early life passes away, so too does a piece of me. I have seen hundreds of heroes and villains alike go to the great beyond. This evening, it felt like there's very little left of me to die.

It doesn't help that I have lost interest in some of the things that used to inspire, enlighten and fill my life with joy. I haven't been to the movie theatre in four years, before that, it was ten years. Between the years I was five and twelve years old (early 60's), I used to go to the movies once a week. It shaped my early impressions of life. Later, when I was about 20, I returned to my weekly habit of movie-going. That lasted about 10 years. It seems that the biggest draw became special effects.

I had the misfortune of having a formative mind just at the time that rock and roll was born. Misfortune, because once the explosion and subsequent wave of incomprehensibly historic music waned, for me, it was as if music had died altogether. Hip hop just doesn't cut it after living through Elvis, The Twist, Beatle Mania, The British Invasion, Woodstock, Heavy Rock, etc.

I never realized how much some of the celebrities who were a part of my life meant to me until they were gone. I don't even understand now why watching an episode of the Dean Martin Roast series on YouTube practically brings me to tears even though I might have a huge grin on my face. I mean other than the fact that probably about half the guests from those shows are ghosts now. It's as if the death of each figure from my childhood takes a little of the colour of my soul away and soon I will be invisible...like them.

I wasn't ready for it, although it's perfectly logical that a point would be reached where the rate of dying celebs from any era would reach a crescendo. At my current age, many of the actors, musicians, comics, etc. that I watched, listened to, laughed at and idolized in my early life, who were just establishing themselves are now about 65-75 years old--right about life expectancy for them. I have mourned so many of the older ones already; I feel I don't have the heart to endure any more. Here is just a sample of the prominent figures who met their maker in 2008...

Suzanne Pleshette - Emily on The Bob Newhart Show.

Roy Scheider - French Connection, Jaws

Sir Arthur C. Clarke - 2001-A space Odyssey

Richard Widmark - Judgement at Nuremberg

Charleton Heston - Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes

Dick Martin - Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In

Harvey Korman - Carol Burnett Show, Blazing Saddles

George Carlin - Comic

Larry Harmon - You probably know him by his "other name"--Bozo the Clown

Isaac Hayes - Wrote the theme from Shaft, the chef on South Park

Jerry Reed - When You're Hot, You're Hot, Amos Moses, Smokey and the Bandit

Paul Newman - List too long

Bettie Page - 50's pin-up model, early Playboy centrefold

Van Johnson - Actor

Rock and Roll Heaven