Sixty-Nine is Middle Aged

This would be funny if it weren’t so freaking sad.

Screw you 2016!

In just fourteen days you’ve taken two of our best and left us with…well, Donald Trump and that creepy Burger King with the plastic hair and psychotic smile.

Earlier this week I was shocked and a little pissed at the loss of David Bowie. I walked around the entire day in a fog, almost as if I could feel the creative void he left behind. I was just getting my groove back when this morning I woke up to the news that the delicious Alan Rickman had passed.

Wait. What?
Things have gotten out of hand, this has just got to stop!

Both were sixty-nine years old, which from over here at fifty-seven seems really young and waaaaaayyyy too close. (Uh, oh, now my own mortality chip has been activated), AND they both died from cancer.

Fuck you cancer!

So now we all know what happens—we wait for the third one to go. It’s some kind of weird numerological anomaly that always proves itself to be true: celebrities die in threes.

When Raphael came home from the gym this morning he was met with my sad-sack face which stopped him in his tracks. I’m sure for a second he assumed I was upset over the fact that my ticket had not won us the  1.5 billion dollars (which I was), or simply that I’d finished my coffee—but he asked me what was wrong anyway.

“Alan Rickman died,” I sort of half sobbed.

“The guy from Harry Potter? The guy with the voice?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed with genuine shock. You see, my husband is so bad at remembering names, movies, actors, and anything pop culture that this was like a fifth grader correctly answering a $1000 Jeopardy question about life on our planet before computers. (As he explains it, he doesn’t want to waste the brain space.) Ouch. That always makes me feel like I need Will Smith to put on his sunglasses and flash that light in my face to free me up some brain bandwidth. (See what I did there?)

“Yeah, yeah, he was in Harry Potter. But oh my gawd, what about Love Actually, and Truly, Madly, Deeply* and Die Hard; oh, and we just saw him in A Little Chaos, remember?”

“Not really”.

“Ohhhhhh, I loved him…and now he’ll never know. I always wanted to meet him so I could ask him to record the outgoing message on my phone.” (Sigh) That voice…I can’t even…”, I could feel a lump growing like a goiter in my throat.

“Oh man, you’ve had a rough week. All your favorites.”
Awwwww, that was nice, some real sympathy. Then he turned on me.

“You know they always go in threes—I hope the third one isn’t Jean-Luc Picard—that would suck.”
He had a slight grin on his face as he ran out of  left the room, “Uh oh, what if he’s six-nine?” he shouted from a safe distance.

Okay, now he was just fucking with me.

I had made a dark secret of mine public knowledge a couple of years back in a speech I made at Raphael’s 60th birthday “roast”— the fact that I had a mad crush on Jean-Luc Picard and had used him as a husband template. Not so much the actor Patrick Stewart, although don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t throw him back. No, more specifically I had the hots for the French, bald, serious, thoughtful, smart, capable, man-who-could-solve-any-problem that the Universe (literally) threw at him and dare I say sexy, Captain of the Starship Enterprise—Jean-Luc Picard.
And I came damn close with Raphael. Except for the Starship, I nailed it.

“Natalie Cole!” I screamed down the hall. “She was the first. Jean-Luc is safe!—Natalie Cooooooole!”

“That was New Years Eve. Doesn’t count. It was still 2015.”

Shit, Game on.

“What about the Motorhead guy?” I was grasping at straws, my brain was scrambling, Google! Google!
Fuck that, “Siri! How old is Patrick Stewart?”

“Motorhead guy was still 2015”.
How did he know this shit? He must have been Googling as fast as his fingers could type. I could hear in his voice that he was trying not to laugh. Jerk.

“Patrick Stewart is seventy-five!” I yelled, filled with genuine relief. “Oh, thank God, he’s safe,” I muttered to myself under my breath, not realizing, because of all of the brain space filled with useless trivia, that that only meant he was six years closer to the pearly gates.

“Why are you yelling? I’m right here,” he said, standing in the doorway wearing only a smirk. (Not really, he was wearing pants, but it makes for a better story.)

All of this to say: Why are all of the great ones dying? Sixty-nine is middle-aged, people play stupid guessing games about who’s died instead of crying, it’s starting to suck being a baby-boomer, death is not the end, and considering who joined the general population this week—Heaven is going to be a blast!

Its been one-hullava week—wanna weigh in?

Carry on,
xox

*”Truly, Madly, Deeply” which came out in 1991, is one of my all-time favorite films and so I went on Amazon to order a DVD so I could watch it this weekend and cry my eyes out—and there was only ONE copy—for $200! WTF?