taking it hard

[freckles_and_doubt]

Fuck cancer. Really, fuck it, and fuck 2016 for so far being a horrible deadly beast. No-one reading this should need to be reminded of the levels of my love for David Bowie and all his works. Likewise Alan Rickman, whose voice and face and ironic distance I have loved across numerous roles. No-one seems to have known that either of them was fighting cancer, and in some ways I'm glad they had that privacy, but to their fans it feels as though they've been stolen away, without warning, stealthily and overnight. Both were artistic institutions quite apart from their significance to me personally. I'm a little surprised by quite how sad and angry I'm feeling.

I hate this about getting older. One's parents die, and one's idols die, and one's cats die. It sucks. Make it stop.

Comments

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

It was beginning to look as if dying of cancer, aged 69, was becoming the thing to do!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Let's hope not. If it catches on, potential losses include Dave Gilmour, Liza Minelli, Timothy Dalton, Dolly Parton, Tommy Lee Jones, Tim Curry, Marina Warner and David Lynch. Also George W. Bush, but not so much with the mourning there. I'd be slightly devastated about Tim Curry or Marina Warner.

[vesta-aurelia.livejournal.com]

Gods above and below, yes.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

If your boss knows you at all, she'll give you the rest of the month off to mourn.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

My previous boss might have. Not this boss. On either the knowing me or caring fronts. I shall attempt to compensate by playing wall-to-wall David Bowie in my office, and seeing how many fellow mourning fans I catch.

[vesta-aurelia.livejournal.com]

The people at my office are, thankfully, sensitive to my twenty-years adoration of Rickman. Sitting at my desk, working, as tears trickled down my face, was possibly a clue to the less-aware among them.

I'm devastated. I can only attempt to imagine how his family and friends feel. Emma Thompson's letter gutted me utterly.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, the ones from the younger HP actors got me - Dan Radcliff and Sean Biggerstaff in particular. Alan Rickman seems to have quietly mentored bunches of young actors, and prodded them into agents and roles. All of the responses from people who knew him have shaped a thoroughly generous and decent man. Bowie was, I think, more complicated, enough of an iconoclast and a maverick that memories of him are not always about warmth, but there are still enough positive testimonials that the knee-jerk and thoroughly uneducated Tumblr bullshit - "he was a racist!" "he was a Nazi sympathiser!" - are getting my goat more than somewhat.

[vesta-aurelia.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen the one from Sean Biggerstaff until your mention of it sent me searching (he's not quite so much a star as Radcliffe, so he's overlooked).

Dear gods above and below--you don't often get a sign like that. I'm so glad he was able to take advantage of it.

Rickman was... truly unique. It's terribly rare that someone with such a vigorous and rigorous inner life is so sociable and gregarious. Usually the one pulls all energy from the other.