I have long been a devotee of Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page. I know it sounds ghoulish – and that’s because it is. Who has a coffee on a chilly winter morn and goes to a page that might as well be called here’s who’s dead? This guy.

Now in my defence, this is usually a jump-off point for me. You go to a person whose job, title, death interests you and you end up in an interesting Wiki-rabbit hole from which it is difficult to extract yourself. But, despite that, it must be said that this page has soured on me in the last year.  

I guess this is when I realized that the page was filling up with people I grew up knowing (of). Actors, directors, writers, sportspeople that were on my TV when I was young and sashaying off the planet with no regard as to my feelings on the subject. This is frankly rude. There is no way the director of When Harry Met Sally should have been able to leave this planet when and how he did. And the fact that Delia Deetz is gone is only slightly mollified by the hopes that she’s singing the Banana Boat Song with John Candy right about now. In fact, as all of these people leave the only thing that makes me happy is that John Candy has more of his friends to hang out with in some awesome pub in the sky.  

I don’t remember my parents’ exact reaction when Jimmy Stewart died or Tullulah Bankhead or Clint Walker. I don’t remember if my dad made a maudlin commentary on life – you know, let me tell you something about getting older – when R. Lee Cobb passed away or Dennis McLynn went to his great reward in the sky. I have no idea how if my parents made a Patton joke the day George C. Scott went off into the sunset. One thing is for sure, I fully understand my grandmother’s habit of reading the obits page in the newspaper every day.

Oh, I know, there’s that huge stupid ‘passage of time’ thing that rears its head when a celebrity dies or you see an old neighbor who used to ride motorcycles and now sits with a blanket across their lap. Blah blah blah. But it does beg the question: how did this happen in eons past?

In Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Thomas Jefferson is mentioned to have cried when he saw LaFayette on his last US tour in 1824. Nostalgia and the fact that most of their comrades were gone makes him comment on their ‘little band of survivors.’ I suppose that it must have surprised him that even the American Revolution had gone from living memory to history and his generation was almost gone.

But he didn’t have to deal with the death of Peter Falk. Columbo. I think we can all agree that when Columbo went off – and then came back for one more thing – and then went off for real, the world started on its current downward trajectory.

Anyway, best not to overthink it.