Of course, there are no givens when it comes to this thing we call life, which explains why the perceptive among us grasp the significance of our every day, realizing not even one of our tomorrows are guaranteed.
I feel so fortunate to have logged 65 years, especially when so many have died so young. Ordinarily, those we’ve lost are mourned for a period of time and sent off to what we all hope is a better place in another realm, but their memories fade a bit as each day passes. It’s the affairs of the living that must be served, which is why, despite our grief, we do let go.
Nonetheless, there’s something about some who’ve died so young that tends to freeze them in perpetuity for us and, ironically, sometimes make them far more famous in death than they ever were in life. I believe that to be the case with a young actor, James Dean, born less than a hundred miles from Lima in 1931 in Marion, Indiana.
Dean was an up-and-coming actor, just three movies into his career, when he made the fatal mistake so many of the young have made, in his case, thinking some type of cloak of invincibility would protect him when he died at the wheel of a Porsche 550 Spyder in what a coroner’s jury opined as being the result of excessive speed.
I thought about Dean quite a bit last month when I saw the glut of publicity both in print and on TV of JonBenet Ramsey, coverage prompted by the 20th anniversary of her murder. Standing in line at Meijer or the grocery I still call Rays, I saw that face on tabloids, the one of her used most often, a professionally done shot of her as a 6-year-old beauty contestant.
It was the day after Christmas in 1996 that she was murdered. While the case has never been solved, it does remain open to this day in Boulder, Colorado. However, even after 1,500 pieces of evidence, 20,000 tips and leads and a 1,000 people interviewed, there remains far more questions than answers.
I watched portions of last month’s programming on the Ramsey case, amazed that had the little girl lived, she’d be a 26-year-old young lady, perhaps, but probably not, as famous as Dean was at 24 years old when he died.
I was also astonished to learn from the two-hour A&E documentary that it took a dozen years after that grisly holiday-season night before the police stopped viewing as suspects the family members — her father, John; her mother, Patsy; and her brother, Blake. Perhaps even sadder was that JonBenet’s mother, Patsy, died of ovarian cancer in 2006 still under suspicion. Imagine losing a child in this fashion and being considered as being complicit in that child’s death all the way to your own grave!
And, last month, each time I saw that face I’ve seen countless times of that little girl, the irony of her fame hit me. Surely she is famous but only after her death, denied her opportunities to either appreciate that fame or hid from it had she lived, which would have and should have been her choice.
There have been so many quotations about the inevitable and universally binding nature of death. It was Bertold Brecht, the late German poet and playwright, who once admonished all, “Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.”
And, while there is certainly great significance in those words, when it comes to my own increasing thoughts of my sands slipping through the hourglass, I can’t help but think of those, from the postmortem famous Dean and Ramsey to so many others, who died before they ever had a chance to find out what their lives would have been.
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