Theres a quote I heard somewhere that described walking around in London on the day of George Harrison’s death in 2001, stating simply, “I’ve just never seen so many grown men cry.” 

My guy died a year ago today. At the time I heard, I was looking at a nine hour stretch of customer service ahead of me with a cold and hollow feeling in my stomach, dreading every second. I texted a friend to see where he had the misfortune of internalizing this loss. “Just going to a meeting about some fucking bullshit.” There was a devastating colorlessness to the moment, and it stayed that way for while.

In that time I was taken back to the vocal wave of mourning I had seen for Bowie, Prince, and the many other rock and roll deaths that seemed to herald an existential autumn for the giants of 20th century pop. I recalled the meandering Facebook posts and tearful karaoke tributes that I and so many others, all of whom had a profound respect for these artists, found to be just a tad excessive. But as the years progress, and more legends pass through the obit section, the more resentful of this type of “fan-mourning” everyone seems to become.

 There was this overwhelming amount criticism toward this kind of grief that pointed only to the grounded elements of the fan-artist relationship:

“Its not like you knew this person.”

“Cool, way to make it about yourself.”

Then my guy died. And I got it. And I started crying in a walk-in fridge. 

The point I mean to make is that you know what grief looks like and you know what real loss is. And I agree with you, this isn’t that.

This isn’t losing a parent, a mentor, or even a pet, but I think everyone who has experienced this embarrassing kind of grief already understands this. These criticisms miss the mark of the situation entirely. You never met the person- so it isn’t actually loss.

The fact that you don’t know the person makes the situation, inherently, only about yourself. It’s not mourning in any traditional sense, but a brief prism through which you have the chance to recontextualize and reevaluate the impact this person has had on you by examining the parts that will no longer be shaped by them. 

It’s not a person. It is a symbolic weight that has tendrils that weave throughout your relationships, your family, your history, and your desires for the future.

When you get something with as much emotional depth and as much openness as Petty’s body of work far before you have the ability to articulate your feelings, or express what is frustrating about your relationships or your family — when you internalize something like “Learning to Fly” —  something so helpful, stirring, and elegiac, yet, at the same time, poetically unspecific in language, stuffed with transcendent and wide-open verbiage — when you let something like that in before you have a handle on who you are or how you can relate to other people, god knows it will take up as much real estate as you give it. 

So when I got texted a link to a TMZ article, and I ended up sobbing in a walk-in refrigerator at 4pm on a Monday, it wasn’t because a man I had never met had a heart attack somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area. Just as it wasn’t for you when a blond British man stopped breathing, or a someone went to sleep outside of Minneapolis and didn’t wake up the next morning. 

It’s not because I lost someone. It’s because I love my brother and I don’t call him enough. It’s because I’m struggling with depression and just beginning to learn how to take care of myself maybe a third of the way through my life. It’s because this is all harder than I thought it would be and I’m doing a worse job than I wanted to. But somewhere, at the bedrock-level of all my opinions about the planet and my own behaviors, there are some open-chord, major key compositions about pain and salvation. And they’re showing me that there is something just and okay behind it all, and that there is importance in the slow transformative stage between the difficulty of the present and the wisdom of experience. 

I showed up in the middle of this man’s career. He started making his best work right after I was born and he stayed around until every lobe in my brain was done developing.  

But the industry is shrinking and diversifying. Fewer things will mean this much to this many people at once.

So when you see, as you will soon, someone crying at a news stand looking at a headline reporting the death of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, or Paul McCartney, take hold of that reflexive callousness and make the effort to keep it at bay. You’re right. They didn’t lose a parent. But they know that. This is something different, playing out in a different way.

You care about things, and you were open to ideas at a young age that have carried you through your life. It’s a beautiful, silly, inarticulate kind of loss that, if you don’t already have an intimate understanding of it, I’m sure you will soon.

I hope you have a connection that well-rooted to something. 

I wish that for all of you.

But most of it is still ahead. This will be a finite era, and we have Beatles to lose yet, so let’s please be kind while this passes, as all things do in time.