As another year ends, the list of famous people who passed away is published in many forms. I watched TV coverage with thousands of others and read the list posted on Facebook. Some I never heard of. Others were in movies or TV shows or recorded music that somehow were a small part of my life. A friend of mine wrote on Facebook that those people had no real meaning to him and reminded us that the service members, firefighters, and police officers who lost their lives are the ones who should be listed. I still read a good old-fashioned newspaper once a week, and one page covered “Notable Deaths” of 2016. So, what makes a person “notable” enough to make the list of celebrity deaths, and, as my friend states, why should we care?
There are some celebrities who have passed away whom I still miss. I miss John Denver and Gilda Radner, for example. This is not to say that I miss them in the same way that I miss the relationship I would have had with my cousin John if he had not been killed in the Vietnam War. My mother-in-law passed away in 2016. I certainly miss her differently than I miss my cousin whom I never really got to know. There are family members I wish would have lived longer so that I could have known them as an adult. My Uncle Joe, for example, was what we affectionately called an “Odd Duck,” but he may not have seemed quite so odd if I could have talked to him when I was older.
I guess what really matters is not if our deaths, whenever they may be, are “notable” to the general public. What matters is if the people we came into contact with take note. Have we loved people enough for them to miss us when we are gone? And, let us remember that even those notably famous people were friends and family to someone. We may or may not miss their music or their other talents, but to their families, they were mom, dad, son, daughter. Whether or not we will ever be notable to strangers, we all should strive to make ourselves notable to those who are closest to us.