When I was young, my mom would tell us this story about pulling her car over on the side of the road after hearing news on the radio that John Lennon had been killed. She was too upset to drive, so she sat there in her car and cried. I didn’t understand it.
I’ve never been an especially empathetic person to begin with, and the idea of mourning the loss of someone you’d never met just didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t understand it, and then David Bowie died.
My ex-husband texted me early in the morning on Jan. 11 to tell me he was sorry for my loss, as if David Bowie had been a close personal friend of mine. I told him I was confused – I’d never really cried over someone dying, before. Even though people I’d known and cared about have passed away, I hadn’t experienced a real sense of loss.
“There’s feeling sad that someone you liked died,” he’d replied. “And then there’s feeling the loss of someone that shaped you as a person.”
To me, David Bowie is ageless. Immortal. He’s been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember. Young Americans is one of the first cassettes I ever owned, and Labyrinth has been my favourite movie since the first time I watched it. It even inspired me to write fantasy stories of my own, as soon as I learned how to read.
My seventh birthday was even David Bowie themed. It didn’t matter to me that none of my friends knew who he was, I would loudly sing along to my favourite Bowie songs – The Jean Genie, Suffragette City, Golden Years – with no shame. It was my party, and I wanted David Bowie there.
For my young, creative mind, David Bowie provided validation that whatever weird project I was working on, it was important. It didn’t matter if other people understood it – it was mine. It was OK to be different. It was OK to be strange. Bowie didn’t need to fit in, and neither did I.
Thanks to this incredible artist, I not only learned more about myself – I learned to appreciate the parts of myself that made me feel alone and misunderstood. And that’s a lesson I can always remember, whether Bowie is on this planet or not.
And he never really belonged here, anyway. He was just visiting.
