The mortality reminder, or, have you never been mellow?
[Writer's note: I started this blog in August, saved the draft, and came back to it in December.] Inevitably as we grow older, the people outside of our lives we only know from TV and movies and music and politics pass on -- just as the people in our lives do. But losing the former is unique in that they are disconnected but, for some, connected in a different way. If the death is tragic and sudden, the pain is shocking (think, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger). However, some beloved celebrities simply grow old and die -- which often is still sad, but carries an air of inevitability. Consider the golden age of television -- almost all those performers are gone, a fact cemented in the last couple years or so with the passing of Carl Reiner, Betty White, Ed Asner, and Gavin McLeod (please hang on, Dick Van Dyke). Watch a movie from the 1940s, or '50s, or even creeping into the '60, and few of the cast members are still alive. Articles have been written about how we'