The Right to Mourn (what's not right to mourn)

Every weekday I flip through Metro NY for my dose of the news on my way to the real reason I pick it up: the soduko and crossword page. This page also tends to have room, just across from the horoscope, for an op-ed piece. One of the columnists writes for the Daily Show and I read his pretty regularly, but the rest I can do without. Today, columnist Clark DeLeon echoed the cries of the rest of the media that's obsessed with Michael Jackson's death by telling us that who we should really be mourning is Farrah Fawcett. This reminds me of when the media covered the news of Princess Diana's death 24/7 for about 2 weeks, all the while telling us we were bad people because we should have been clamouring to mourn Mother Theresa, who died at the same time.

Media hypocrisy aside, what really bothers me about this is that there is some assumed right and wrong about mourning someone or something. When I was in high school, my grandmother and my dog died in the same week. My grandmother was in her eighties and I saw her 2-4 times a year. My dog slept next to my bed every single night. You can guess which one broke my heart.

I don't believe that there's a bottom line of personal tragedy which can be reached by adding up the sum of our experiences: Let's see, add two points for regular contact, subtract one for bad qualities, add 3 for tragic and sudden reason for demise...
...it doesn't work that way.

Although my will to live was not crushed by either Farrah or Michael's passing, if I had to mourn one of them, it would be Michael Jackson (and that's a pretty big stretch). After all, as a child of the eighties and not the seventies, I haven't had much to do with Farrah. Michael, on the other hand, has been in my musical vocabulary since I was old enough to listen to the radio. I still blast "The Way You Make Me Feel" when I need a pick-me-up and if the radio stations would ever stop playing "Thriller" these days I might be able to go back to enjoying it once a year on Halloween as most members of my generation do.

So if you want to mourn the death of Billy Mays as loudly as he used to sell OxiClean, go right ahead. I won't tell you you're wrong.