Write this 10 page paper in 3 sections;

1.) Connect your own grief and loss experiences with what you’ve learned in this course.

2.) Interview a person of your choice about that person’s grief and loss experience, connect what you learned in the interview to course content (See Grief Questionnaire you are to use in Appendix A – also attached on this page as a PDF for download).

3.) Synthesize what you have learned about yourself and about grief counseling from completing the assignment.

Grief and Celebrity Deaths

Andre Rawls

With the several events that have happened in the past few years, and the loss of many celebrities that held a significant place within our lives and influence, I have often found myself trying to understand why the death of people in the media or celebrities affect us in the same sense of losing a family member. I can recall when famous rapper Nipsey Hussle died last year, it almost felt like my super intelligent cousin from my mom’s side had passed away. But why is that? I did not know him personal and he surely did not know me, but it still hurt like we’d joked or talked several times. With the recent passing of Kobe Bryant, someone whom I have had the upmost respect for since the 1990’s, I felt the deep shock of ‘this cannot be real’. There is definitely a need for feelings to be validated, and that you are not overreacting when you mourn the loss of a celebrity. It may come off that you are treating it too close to home and have no reason to feel the things that you do. However, grief and mourning a celebrity or public figure should be treated the same way one would any other loss. They are real emotions that come from a real place in you and should be treated as such.

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. The relationships we have with celebrities may not necessarily follow typically understood measures of time and space, making them seem subconsciously immortal to us in a sense; they don’t age with us. When Michael Jackson died, it seemed that there would never be a day that could even happen. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I literally was wearing the day the news headlines broke stating he was no longer with us. Mourning the loss of someone you don’t know but feel connected to looks a lot like mourning any other loss. Of course, in 2020, you log onto all of the social media outlets and someone posted on their Facebook page yesterday, “I guess celebrity deaths make me feel like almost nothing is left from my childhood/youth…”. Because of today’s popular social media platforms, we have access to the most intimate details of people’s lives. We can see pictures of them at any time we want to and can read their own thoughts in their public posts. The accessibility makes us feel like we have a personal relationship with them. In other words, we identify with them, so we have a bond and grieve when they pass away. A common thing people often comment when an artist, actor, or musician die is “well at least the world still has all of their work”. Even in the sense that this is true, and these works of art, music, or political action are often what has touched us about celebs, having their existing works doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep sense of loss that they will never create anything new. We could hear a new song, or read a new book or poem, see a new movie, or go to another concert. We can simultaneously feel grateful for the works that exist while grieving the loss of their potential future works.

I find it interesting the things that connect us to these people we idolize so much, the sport they played so well, the songs that made us feel that one indescribable feeling, or even the way their untimely death came. We may actually connect with the way a celebrity died. Whether it was an illness like cancer, a suicide that we did (or didn’t) see coming, an accidental overdose, car accident or any other type of death, this can hit a nerve. It may be because we have struggled with the same thing, or it may be because we lost someone in the same way. In reality, we don’t actually know celebrities, but we know celebrities. They have become a normal part of our lives, in the shows and movies we love, creating the music that defines moments in our lives, creating art and writing we love. We have spent years seeing them grow and change and, in some cases have felt connected to those changes. “First things first rest in peace Uncle Phil”, a line from J. Cole’s song No Role Modelz, that’s a line we all know and we all respect, however he didn’t say “rest in peace James Avery”. WE knew him as Uncle Phil and her gave us the feeling of a loving uncle who wanted the best of his nephew (and what felt like every single person who watched the Fresh Prince of Bel Air). And when he died it felt like we all lost a dear mentor. A connection like this is not just about how much we love, appreciate and respect these people, but sometimes because they remind us of, well, us or someone we know and love that may or may not be here anymore.

I noticed that I have developed my strongest feelings of connection to many celebrities during times of my own transitional phases in my life. For example, I was a teenager who covered his bedroom walls in posters of sports or music celebrities because I was trying to figure out who I was. These people I truly admired and used them as a blueprint of who I someday wanted to become. I felt that I could manifest myself into everything I’d ever wanted if I surrounded myself. In this manner, our self-identities often become intertwined with the favorite celebrities who helped shape them. When they pass, it feels like a part of us has died, too. When a celebrity dies, we realize that we have lost a person who connects us with so many other people in the entire world. On the bright side, we know that there are so many of us we feel the same way, we can share our grief openly and publicly, as a tribe. There’s a sense of being united and that no one is alone at this awful time. The worst part about a celebrity death is that you are constantly reminded of what has happened. Going back to thinking about Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, I myself almost find myself being tired of the constant reminder that one of my childhood heroes is literally gone. He wasn’t battling a disease, addicted to any drugs, he wasn’t old, he wasn’t even doing something he had no business doing to make it even feel like a loss that we could genuinely handle. He was just going about his typical day and boom in an instant, gone. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I will ever truly recover from this death. Just the way many of our mothers have a long-standing love for Princess Diana, and are constantly reminded of her beautiful life, and her tragic death. I think of the many times my mother would speak of her as if they were the best of friends. I know there will never be another Kobe Bryant, who inspired an entire generation of athletes to never be afraid to fail and to never be lazy.

At this point, I would consider myself at a point of anger. I’m upset were have to even talk about this, I am upset TMZ violated basic humanity and aired the story before the family of the departed was notified. I cannot come to terms of why the helicopter pilot wasn’t more careful. It makes my stomach cringe thinking about how terrified the children on board were knowing they were likely going to die; can you imagine how awful the last moments were. And I am also upset with myself for letting these things all dwell my mind, even though it’s obviously okay to do so but you feel a sense of “what am I really mad at?” It’s safe to say this is going to sit on my mind for a while, and I am both ashamed and not ashamed at how I feel. I know the entire world is grieving so I am not alone. I just hope it ideally will pass, but I still can’t fathom that we lost a true legend (but legends never truly die).

Chapter 1 of Grief observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting .I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace. On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it. For H. wasn’t like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure—and there’s another red-hot jab—of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H.’s lover. And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting. Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand? Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’ Our elders submitted and said, ‘Thy will be done.’ How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love—yes, in every sense, an act—put on to hide the operation? Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him? One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe. After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers. At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles. Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own. I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother’s death when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood. Or are the boys right? What would H. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?—no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to H. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence. It isn’t only the boys either. An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 22-23). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 22). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 21-22). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 20-21). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 20). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 19-20). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 18-19). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 18). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 17-18). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 16-17). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 16). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 15-16). HarperOne. Kindle Edition. Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 15). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.