What is it about the deaths of others, people we didn’t have a personal relationship with, that can be so troubling for so many of us? A few years ago there was a year where it seemed like everyone died. Seems weird to say it now, and in future years, when younger people come up not remembering it, not having iced through it, then no doubt it will seem weirder still — but it’s true, isn’t it? In 2016, it seemed you couldn’t go a week without a significant figure from our collective culture passing away. It seemed to start in early January with David Bowie, and continue until late December, with Carrie Fisher, and in between “we lost” everyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali to Prince. It was a strange time — the normal cynical remarks about public grief quietened as so many people heard of the death of someone who was specifically meaningful to them.
What is public grief? What kind of grief do we feel upon the deaths of people we don’t really, personally, know? I’m certain that while it’s not the same as when someone close to us dies — the change in our habits and interactions, or of intimate moments — it can nonetheless be pretty meaningful in other ways. Despite never knowing someone, their death can speak to us about what we thought about ourselves, and where we are in our lives. Some might regard that as selfish, but I think the same thing happens in intimate, personal grief. When a loved one dies, we of course miss them, and feel a deep sadness for their passing, but we are also mourning something in ourselves, an idea of ourselves, our lives or our futures that was supported by the presence of the other.
When a doctor whom Martin was supposed to be visiting, and who shared an office building with Niles’ private practice, has a heart attack, a strange public grief intrudes on Frasier’s life. Despite not knowing the doctor, it affects him profoundly, both being a similar age and demographic, and the death sends Frasier into an anxious spiral. One might think of it as the onset of a mid-life crisis, the last deluded assumptions of immortality offered by youth having finally floated on, and there’s certainly a terror of mortality at play in his reaction, as he attempts to put his life and papers in order.
But in his response there’s also a sudden, shocking crisis of meaning in his life. Perhaps death is neither here nor there as a spectre — the absence of life — but rather than his life itself is lacking, and the things he has been chasing, craving — respect, influence, recognition — neither protect him from the cold touch of the grave, nor give him succour in life. What he saw in the doctor’s death he hasn’t hitherto seen, even, presumably, in the death of his mother, or near-death of his father, but he does see in a stranger, precisely because the values of the stranger are his. “He was just like me,” he worries to his father, ‘highly educated, sophisticated, he was at the top of his profession. I saw a picture of him in a medical journal, he even looked like me! Same determined chin, sweater vest and ever so slightly receding hairline”.
I think it’s too easy to write off such worries as a mortality scare induced by mid-life, or rather, if it is that, to write off a mid-life crisis as a pop cultural cliché. The middle-aged man, especially a wealthy, white, and straight one, may hardly be the world’s most sympathetic character, but the fear they indulge in is maybe a noble one — to make the most of life. When celebrities or figures of note die, we all experience something similar; a personal role-model who did something worthwhile has passed on, and our grief is also a questioning of our worth, our role. Do we live up to the example of those we admire?
For me, the saddest, most meaningful death of 2016 was that of George Michael, who died on Christmas Day. I was sad, of course, that he died, and too young at that. But really, it was acknowledging for a moment the important role he played in my life as a role model. It was when I was first coming to terms with my sexuality that he had his effect, unknown to me at the time. My initial explorations of sex in my early teens were accompanied by mockery, once they became known by my peers. It was shortly after George Michael had been arrested for cottaging, and scandal and homosexuality filled the air with a confusing miasma of shame and excitement for me. People repeatedly made reference to the singer’s crimes. This was me, a tawdry, sad, disgusting way to be — but when I saw George respond to the taunts of Britain’s media, he seemed full of a belligerent and shameless enjoyment of his sexuality. His refusal to hide it away, to be shamed by it, was compounded with his creative response, the song and video Outside. I don’t think I quite appreciated it as it happened, but I was absolutely blessed by George Michael — to have this opportunity to see homosexuality as a pleasure and its opponents as boring curtain twitchers gave me an unconscious armour for another decade, enough to see me through my teenage years. His death hit me, because his behaviour, even as a stranger, had been a model for how not to internalise shame.
For Frasier, the lesson is something else, something about the meaning of his profession and status. In the end, attending the dead doctor’s house, he finds his family sitting shiva, a Jewish period of mourning for seven days following a death. He consoles not just himself but the doctor’s widow with the realisation that there is — and this is one of the hardest lessons of life — no real meaning to death itself. It’s life that matter, life where we find joy and meaning, and life itself is not the grand meaningful gesture of death, but a series of tiny, seemingly insignificant moments of pleasure or value. As the episode draws to an end, we’re left realising that for Frasier, meaning is found in two places — offering comfort to the emotionally distressed, and, as a woman approaches him as he leaves and offers him her number — in the fleeting little death of sex.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.