FAY ROWE | Author/Speaker

Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson died last week. They were mourned by family and friends and by many of the public. You heard, I know.

Amid all the related television and INTERNET flurry last week I found myself conflicted by the coverage of their passing. I certainly wouldn't consider their deaths unimportant, nor the media attention unexpected. Maybe it is right that we mourn those who've been part of our lives even though we've never met. I remember being touched by the death of several celebrities, more than I thought I'd be. Perhaps because they were so much a part of my youth, or made me laugh or cry. Or sang to me.

Yet, there were many others who died last week whose names most of us will never know. They were mourned just as deeply by their own families and friends and others whose lives were touched by theirs. Soldiers, they were, or doctors, teachers, choir members, office managers. There were surely some grandfathers who left us, and grandmothers, or even mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, and beloved children. Perhaps life long friends or friends met only casually now and then at the Tim's on Main Street.

The unknowns who died last week brought about this post more than did the three celebrities. The unknown passings and the lives uncelebrated in the ever present media made me think of how many seem to feel that celebrity is something worth striving for, as if it carries with it certain happiness. (After all, we see all those smiling, satisfied  faces on television, in magazines, on billboards.) 

How much better to strive for work that is excellent, for achieving something of lasting benefit to our world. For fulfilling destiny.

It's only in this time, with its almost unfathomable increase in media of all kinds, that celebrity has become such a sought after prize, a prize which may be a mirage. Exhilarating at first, I'm sure, and certainly so with the financial boon it carries, but perhaps soon losing its thrill.

In fact, I wonder if the young couple unnoticed in the old Ford is actually just as happy as the young paparazzi-swarmed couple in the Jaguar, and the grandparents who spend time with their grandkids at McDonald's as happy as those who can take their grandchildren to exotic places. I expect it is so.

I'm not saying the "have-nots" and the obscure are happier than the rich and the famous. Not at all. (The Bible talks a lot about the benefits of having wealth, if wealth doesn't have you, as it will if it becomes your end goal!)  I'm saying that their journeys are probably just as joyful or tragic, their lives equally worth celebrating or not as the case may be, and, at the end of their journey and in just the same way, their passings are mourned by someone who loves them.

In truth, all of us, celebrated publicly or not, are loved and celebrated by someone.

"Notwithstanding, rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, [or that you have become rich and/or successful, as good as that may be] rejoice that your names are written in Heaven" (Luke 10:20).

Jesus