I'm trying to think of those I've lived through--Princess Diana's death, the extended phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, September 11, Michael Jackson's death--and what they have in common. The most obvious connection they all have is untimely death. But they're about the wondrous and terrible: an ordinary girl who turned into a princess and was crushed in a tunnel; an ordinary boy who discovers that he has extraordinary powers only to learn that his best use of them is surrender and acceptance of death; 19 fairly ordinary men who did something so unimaginably audacious that the federal government didn't bother to take the threat it presented seriously, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives; a boy out of Gary, Indiana who could do remarkable things with his body and his voice, yet seemed to hate the former, to the point of destroying it with plastic surgery, drugs, anorexia.
I don't know what that means, if we can't experience beauty without an undercurrent of terrible sadness running underneath it, if we can't experience the extraordinary without the possibility that it will fail, or crash, or destroy itself. Whatever it means, it's got me feeling melancholy, which, I suppose, is the proper thing to be feeling the day of a funeral.