Abiding Memory

I did not want to write about Whitney Houston’s death because like Amy Winehouse, she  too has been turned into a cautionary tale about the failure to deal with success, wealth, adulation and fulfilled dreams. When a glistening firefly crashes and burns..it is the done thing to perform an autopsy upon a life story. Oh,  we say in unison, “they had everything and they blew it.” The thing to understand though is that no one dies of success or fame or brilliant creativity. They die of little things..which in retrospect are the things that really count. They die of bad relationships. Of loneliness that cannot be assuaged with awards and chart burning hits. Of never being able to see just how deserving they are of love that is not destructive and self-denuding and fragmenting. They die of  the gaps between visible success and personal fulfilment. They die of over scrutiny and undernourished souls.

Not everyone can figure out the life and fame balance as well as a  Meryl Streep. Or like Oprah Winfrey and JK Rowling discussed in an interview, only those who do not constantly feel pressured to repeat and exceed their biggest triumph, get off the Merry-Go-Round in one piece. Nothing is enough if we don’t feel enough. I see this sickness everywhere and not just in celebrated lives and early deaths of famous people. This is a malady of the times. No matter how much we do, it never seems enough because we are always thinking of what more could be done. We want to prove ourselves every day, every moment. To ourselves. To others.

Our little successes are not good enough because they are not big enough. We do not take pleasure in milestones because we have not yet reached that final triumph that we think we deserve. Our homes, our work, our lives are not enough..And those we think who have it all..do they really? They feel as damaged in their glorious shells of success as those who are struggling to acquire them. As many celebrities will tell you..there comes a point when you have the houses, the cars, the fan following, the awards and the most frightening questions are still looming right ahead, waiting to be answered.

Are you happy? Is this all there is to it? What more is left to achieve? What next? A point when all the plastic surgery, drugs, shopping bags, applause are not enough. That is the point that makes someone into a richer, whole person or breaks them down. That is when you take a call whether you want to keep numbing yourself with shots of oblivion or face your life, fair and square and deal with it.

That said, some people are more fragile than the others and lesser equipped to deal with vicious opinion mongering, with the downside of fame and then there are some who despite extreme challenges skim through the pain and still make it to the other side. I do not know if we would be any better at dealing with abusive relationships, the inability to seek help and pull ourselves back from the abyss when it is staring back at us. We cannot judge. We cannot walk in shoes not our own. So for me, Whitney remains the unsplintered  memory of a girl who wanted to dance with somebody and to always love someone but lost her way and never found  that core, that place where she was once just a young soul with big hair and a bigger voice poised for extraordinary things. I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t care. It is enough that she sang her heart out and left something behind that will never let us forget her.