Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Chronic. George Michael and the right to mourning – the Observer

Bowie. Prince. Cohen. And now George Michael, not to speak of others. "Oh, now suddenly like all of the (insert here the name of the star recently deceased) since the little ones", it reads in the networks. So if you live to death there: some start by sticking a few tributes more or less experienced, others question the authority of who published them, and still others send a few jokes cynical about the community and the bereaved.

But the mourning of a figure cross of popular culture is like the water, is not denied to anyone. Even those who do not mourn so sincerely the death of a star — almost all, in fact — cry surely his own. May not know what you have been the Prince or George Michael doing in the last few years, but do not resist dancing to "Kiss", "Let’s Dance" or "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" on that track intoxicated at 3 in the morning, or maybe drop a tear when they hear "Hallelujah" performed by an anonymous in a talent contest. And, although none of these manifestations make anyone an expert in a work, shall confer upon any person the unquestioned right to suffer a loss: the loss of a part of himself to die the author of the soundtrack of a memory.

This farewell we own is also judged by who shows compassion to most of the great tragedies of mankind from that of the great neuroses inherent to the human condition — as if we were in the dressing room to compare the size of the sorrows. Is that, just as there are people think think about the hunger in Africa is the solution to any depression, there are also those who dictate that you can’t cry over the death of the Prince of the children in Aleppo. By the way, I remember the time I told a friend: "I love you, but I also love the east timorese". It was a friend who, in January, also suffered with the death of David Bowie, proving that no love — and, therefore, no suffering — is mutually exclusive.

Less moral superiority in social networks would enable us to suffer, without guilt, more for the death of a Prince that by the death of an aunt or more by the Choir of the Red Army than by the grandfather of our best friend. Cry as it should be — depending on the empathy and the sense of loss. Come here to impose to me the protocol of the grief that I soon I tell you what passed me by the head, when a lady said to me that "should have been mass" at the funeral of my father an atheist.

For this that I write, George Michael was not even an idol, is just the memory of that time, in 1985, in which I confessed to my grandmother that thought he was cute and she answered me "that mariquinhas!"; or that other in which, for the first time in my life, I decided to take the lyrics of a song ("Heal the Pain", a partnership beautiful with Paul McCartney) – only with a dictionary and the miserable English from the 5th year. It is the memory of having fantasized my future (gorado) stylist while watching repeatedly the videos of "Freedom 90" or, later, of "Too Funky". And I have goose bumps against the will of the rock when I heard the duet with Elton John on "Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me" at the time of pre-adolescence in which the pleasures were really guilty. This was my George Michael, the one that I lost. Is not equal to yours, and should not have anything to do with the man who died yesterday, at age 53. The loss is something that is ve ry intimate. I have already mentioned the anecdote: every one cries where you have more homesick.

Ana Markl is a screenwriter, tv host at Canal Q, and animator of radio Antena 3

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