At the end of each year, the Media brings to our attention a chronicle of movie celebrities whose lives came to an end during that particular year. The list of these celebrities who passed from this world in 2013 is, as it always is, jarring. So many lives, so vibrant on the screen, now extinguished. We always experience a certain shock, along with a piercing sadness when we learn of their demise. Did not Esther Williams, Joan Fontaine, and Eydie Gormé appear to be immortal in celluloid? Did Jonathan Winters, Peter O’Toole, and James Gandolfini have any premonition that their lease on life would suddenly expire? We watched Karen Black, Julie Harris, and Geena Davis and believed that they were endowed with un-diminishable vitality. We envied all those actors and actresses that seemed larger than life. And now we know that they were not larger than life. Our envy has changed to sorrow. We are left with the strange and disquieting feeling that we non-celebrities have succeeded them.
Death is the great leveler. Celluloid immortality, if there is such a thing, is not personal immortality. Movie stars beguiled and entertained us. But they were not beings who belonged to the heavens. They were just like us, as it turns out – mortal, fragile, destined to pass from the earth. Their deaths bring to mind two thoughts: that the distinction between celebrity and non-celebrity is meaningless; that we must renew our commitment to finding meaning in our own lives. We bid good-bye to Patti
Page, Jean Stapleton, and Annette Funicello, and return to our own day-to-day obligations with stronger dedication. Life belongs to the living. The deceased are entrusted to God’s merciful hands.
The existential philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev has stated that “Death is the most profound and significant fact of life, raising the least of mortals above the mean commonplaces of life.” If there were no death, he goes on to say, life would be meaningless and without hope. It is only through death that we can escape to a better world. “If life in our world continued forever, there would be no meaning in it.” “The meaning of death”, for Berdyaev, “is that there can be no eternity in time and that an endless temporal series would be meaningless.” People who merely reach for the stars are not reaching high enough.
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Cinematic favorites are called “Stars” because stars are in the heavens, and therefore above us, and seem to be, as the Ancients believed them to be, imperishable. Death proves that this image is but an illusion. What we all yearn for is not stardom, but eternity. Fame is a soap bubble. Christianity teaches us about the Resurrection, which is the victory of life over death. In addition, we are less likely to mistreat or neighbor when we see them as dying, even though that point of death belongs to an indeterminate point in the future. Recognizing each person’s mortality elicits in us a certain sympathy that casts aside any possible rancor or envy that we might harbor. When we visit a person who is bedridden in a hospital, our thoughts and actions are loving and supportive. We fight each other in moments when we fail to see each other as we really are, namely, mortal beings who are destined to die.
The “bell tolls for Thee,” as John Donne has reminded us. We owe each other a profound sympathy inasmuch as we are all made of the same clay and are journeying toward that presently unknown moment when time and eternity intersect. Our attitude toward others would be more Christian if we saw them as dying and established our relationship with them in accordance with both this fact and the fact of our own mortality. We say adieu to our screen celebrities with the hope that their personal lives have earned them an eternity of everlasting joy with the God who is Life in its totality.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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