kjweldon

[kjweldon]

2017

It was the death of Prince that established 2016 as the worst year ever. The one-two punch of David Bowie and Alan Rickman had been bad, but no worse than any other year. But in April, Americans decided collectively that the year was a disaster. That was before Donald Trump won first the nomination and then, unthinkably, the presidency. Before Leonard Cohen died. And Gwen Ifill. And Gene Wilder. A nation shellshocked by the election faced the end of the year with grim humor. Pinterest filled up with instructions for making dumpster fire ornaments. The tired jokes made the rounds: protect Betty White. Take Ruth Bader Ginsburg to an undisclosed location until the year ends. Die, 2016, die.

Then Christmas week took Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Debbie Reynolds. The jokes turned to a solemn and miserable silence. For every person who complained about the horror of 2016 on Facebook, there was a commenter ready to point out that arbitrary periods of time could not be evil. The data scientists threw their hats in the ring, pointing out that indeed, the number of A- and B-list celebrity deaths this year were indeed a bit higher than usual, and the average age lower. Or, perhaps, that the number of deaths was normal, and only the clustering was odd. No matter. No one was listening to the numbers guys anyway. People were too busy reposting memes, creating memorial playlists for holiday parties, rewatching Harry Potter and Star Wars and Singin’ in the Rain.

And then New Year’s came and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Other than a few people who believed deeply in unlucky numbers and astrology, no one really believed it was the year responsible for all the death. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that no one wanted to admit, even to themselves, that they had started to become superstitious about 2016. Still, despite the coming inauguration, there was a sense on January 1, 2017, that the long battle had ended, and the world was turning toward morning.

Then Elton John’s airplane crashed. January 2. With the New Year’s holiday on a Sunday, many people had Monday off. They hadn’t even returned to work yet, and another death.

The next day it was LeBron James in a car accident and Michael Phelps of an aneurysm.

That was a bit of a change-up. Most of the 2016 deaths had come from the world of music or film. Sports figures had to this point largely been spared, with the notable exception of Mohammed Ali. But he was long past of the peak of his fame, and his death hadn’t registered as much more than extra ballast to the misery of the year. But now 2017 was starting with two athletes, still young. Guys who had ignored all the fuss thus far were glued to ESPN watching tributes.

Two days passed before the next victim: Sarah Michelle Gellar. Gen X and the Millennials held planned costumed vigils, but the day after her skiing accident, Johnny Depp overdosed, so Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands stood beside Buffy. A few Princess Leias and Snapes inevitably showed up, sparking a national debate over the what it meant to appropriate a memorial. Facebook became the nation’s site of mourning.

Then J.K. Rowling had a stroke, and the whole world keened in grief.

Now the conspiracy theorists came out in full force. Donald Trump, said a commentator on DailyKos, was killing off his competitors for fame. No, argued Alex Jones, it was ISIS, bent on destroying the dominant Western culture. A strange new sexually-transmitted disease caused disorientation, clumsiness, heart failure. A serial killer. A gang of serial killers. Ancient curses. Brand new curses. Desperate for a rational explanation, producers of morning shows booked doctors to talk about the dangers of stress in contemporary life. Celebrities, whose lives were even more stressful than average people, were the first to show the effects of 24/7 social media, lack of sleep, pressure. Surely that was all.

The data scientists were on TV as well, trying to explain that outliers were indeed part of a normal distribution, that some periods would have more celebrity deaths than others. If they were heard at all, it wasn’t for long.. First came the fashion show that killed seventeen major actors, including four People’s Choice winners, in a fire set by Karl Lagerfeld’s cigarette. Then the entire Douglas clan suffered a brutal food poisoning incident at a family function, and only Catherine Zeta Jones survived. Between these two incidents, only three days apart, Anthony Bourdain died of eating improperly prepared pufferfish, the Property Brothers were crushed in a roof collapse, Mick Jagger ODed on prescription pills, Aretha Franklin broke her neck falling down a flight of stairs, and Anderson Cooper was shot in Syria.

Rumors started to fly that the Oscars would be bombed - by ISIS, by neo-Nazis, by Russians, by the Church of Scientology. So few invitations were accepted that fashion designers and drivers were offered spaces. Those who showed included the very old and brave and the very young and ambitious. Maggie Smith accepted her award with a sly look to the camera, a smile, and a slow slump onto the stage. The cause of death was described by her physician as “a terminal case of knowing how to make an exit.”

People put out its first memorial edition that was neither focused on a single celebrity nor published at year’s end. The editors demurred when questioned about plans, but the new People Remembered began to appear biweekly. The New York Times fought the trend for three more months, then began including a memorial insert monthly, which came to be known as the Dead Society Page.

The poster on DailyKos found his beliefs about Trump's involvement rejected by the the community, so he took his theories to his own site. Trump: Celebrity Serial Killer developed a huge following. Trump threatened to sue, but nothing came of it. He may have been too busy on Twitter, discounting the ideas that the most famous were dying first. “Such sad news, but glad the really big celebrities untouched. #MAGA.”  “Created task force to determine why famous musicians and actors dying at such rate. Glad whatever is happening doesn’t affect leaders!”

The dead had indeed not yet included any politicians of note. But then Cory Booker helped an elderly woman out of a burning building and was overcome by smoke inhalation. Two days later, talking to a group of schoolchildren, Al Franken pretended to fall off the Senate balcony, losing his balance and landing headfirst on Booker’s chair. Just one week after that, Hillary Clinton contracted a new and deadly form of bird flu when in Singapore for a Clinton Foundation-sponsored Summit on Women’s Health and died within days.

The series of tributes to fallen Democrats pushed Trump over the edge. At 2 AM the night of Clinton’s funeral, he tweeted out comments about how the country was “purging the losers.”  Unfortunately, his tweets crossposted with announcements of the deaths of Garth Brooks and Danica Patrick. The faith of his base was shaken for the first time, and former fans gathered across the South and the Rust Belt to burn their red caps and copies of Art of the Deal. The great raging bonfires themselves claimed several lives, but none famous, so no one noticed.

B-list actors at first saw opportunity in the loss of more famous competition, but after 27 Oscar winners died in May alone, ambition became overcome by fear. Casting agents found their calls unreturned. Some of the A-list believed there was no avoiding the inevitable. Meryl Streep and Drew Barrymore joked on Colbert that there was no chance of them becoming less famous overnight, so why hide? All three were killed in a gas explosion backstage. The photo of the two women laughing together while Colbert looked on appeared on the front page of two hundred newspapers.

After that, booking late night shows became nearly impossible. The A list thought they were tempting fate; the B list didn’t want to become any more famous than they were. Even the least famous among the famous began to shirk the limelight, as if the very act of being seen on television or quoted in the newspaper might draw death. Producers found themselves rejected by professors, first term Congressmen, mayors of minor cities, athletes in the lesser Olympic sports, and Broadway actors who were not Lin-Manuel Miranda (electrocuted when a hairdryer fell in the tub).

Ira Glass and Sarah Vowell devoted a special episode of This American Life to the celebrity death problem, in which they agreed that it was a good thing that NPR-famous didn’t count. Ira was found drowned in a hotel swimming pool later that week. Vowell locked herself in her bedroom, which she described later in her book Accidental Survivor as going “full Brian Wilson.”

On FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver concluded that greater fame increased risk and calculated a celebrity’s odds of dying based on a formula that included the number of TV appearances over the last five years, number of awards received, and box-office, ratings, or album sales figures, and meme presence. He claimed that he skipped politicians and others because he lacked good comparative data, but the other political bloggers accused him of fearing Trump’s response if the president either topped the list of the doomed or didn’t rank high enough. The List became a touchstone. At grim parties, the famous compared their scores. The country watched nervously as the top twenty died off within two months.

The religious blamed sinful Hollywood lifestyles. Churchgoing increased, as did sales of lucky charms and protective candles and incense. A Pew Research Center poll determined that fully seventy percent of the public believed that the deaths were a punishment, but the country was divided on what it was being punished for. About half believed it was abortion and gay marriage, the other half believed it was the results of the 2016 election. Both sides held vigils - in some places, nightly. A few fanatics hoped the right sacrifice would stop the epidemic and took matters into their own hands. The assassination attempts on Paul Ryan and Pope Francis were unsuccessful, but RuPaul and Keith Richards were both killed.

Richards’ death ended what had become a booming business in death-betting. The odds against him had been so high the bookies lost their shirts. But gambling in all forms increased as people began to lose their faith in randomness, in probability, in chance.

David Brooks wrote a column blaming everything on a lack of bipartisanship, and at last his utterings were considered inane enough to get him fired. Inevitably, people joked that this was one good thing to result from all this tragedy, but now, in September, with more than six hundred celebrity deaths since January 1 by the Washington Post’s estimation, even gallows humor had lost its savor.

The CDC had been unable to determine any common thread among the deaths besides fame. Their only response was a public health campaign on preventing heart diseases and avoiding household accidents. Ads ran in Variety and mass emails were sent to members of the Actor’s Guild and the American Federation of Musicians reminding them about taking their meds, scheduling preventive screenings, keeping fresh batteries in their smoke detectors.

The task force Trump had ordered never actually met, a fact revealed in Mother Jones and reported for two days on the major networks before George Takei, Betty White, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Beyonce and Jay Z, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, and Taylor Swift all died on the same day. Under pressure from members of Congress, who had been fielding unprecedented calls and letters from constituents looking for days in memoriam for each lost celebrity in turn, Trump called for a national day of mourning. Kellyanne Conway emphasized in the announcement that all government employees would still be expected to work.

The country took a day to grieve. In every city and town, at national parks, along rural highways, Americans took to the streets to mourn. They sang, held hands, carried photos and banners with the names of the fallen. And they wept. They wept for their idols. They wept for the songs that would never be written and the stories that would never be told. They wept for the people they were when they first danced to their favorite song, voted for someone they really believed in, watched their team win the championship, fell in love with a stranger on a screen. They wept for their own lost ones, so irretrievably gone, their lives undocumented, unfilmed, their deaths uncelebrated, barely remembered outside their families, their loves. They wept for their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, friends and lovers who never made the team, wrote the hit, got the role, won the race, whose dreams were so long lost they were unknown, forgotten. They wept for the America they had once believed they were. The nation cried until it had no more tears, and then went back to their homes, where they sat in quiet, the television and the internet and even their cell phones off.

And then it was over. Two days passed, three, a week. No deaths of note. The following week Danny Bonaduce was stabbed by a prostitute, and headlines screamed “Not Over Yet?” but there was agreement that this seemed less an aberration than a return to normality. People Remembered stopped production. Trump threatened a military attack on China. And the networks and magazines and websites began planning their 2017 retrospectives, a review of the worst year ever.