When the young die

In the last two weeks two young talented men, both in their thirties, have tragically died: Stephen Gately, the former Boyzone singer, aged 33, and Garth Stead, the brilliant Cape Town photographer, aged 37, who literally painted images of lyrical beauty with his Nixon camera. Sadly, it appears that Garth died by his own hand. The Greeks knew that “Those whom the gods love die young”. The notion of the artist doomed to early death, bequeathed by the Romantics, remains deeply embedded in modern culture. And in traditional African culture too: the Zulus say “Isitsha esihle asidleli”, a reference to the best vessels breaking first. I heard this first when a beautiful young Zulu princess died last year in a car accident.

The roster of the talented young, untimely dead grows ever longer and is well-known: Percy Shelley and John Keats, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix and Heathcliff Ledger. Our relationship with stars is as intense and intimate as it once was with poets. Actors live other lives for us on stage and on the screen. We live through them in other worlds (and now virtual technologies), and we expect, like our lovers, to grow old with them. When they die young, we are immediately reminded of our own impending deaths, and the need to seize the day.

The outpouring of grief over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 (for she was an artist in an unique way), Michael Jackson earlier this year, and Stephen Gately last week, fits squarely into a ritual of public mourning so familiar that it edges close to banality.

I remember walking through the ocean of flowers, teddy bears and balloons, trying to draw breath in the stale, sickly stench of incense and candles on that muggy day in London after the car crash. The quasi-religious scenes felt strange, and certainly not Anglo-Saxon. Like a foreign land — more evocative of Catholic Italy or Orthodox Greece. I took an overnight flight to Johannesburg en route to Zimbabwe that evening. The British Airways plane eerily silent and the entertainment switched off. The “People’s Princess”, I believe, would have been mortified that her ebullient personality was being remembered in this way.

When I watched those strange scenes on television of mourners shouting “Diana!” and throwing flowers at her passing hearse, I, like many others, thought to myself: “Since when have the British people acted like this?” Then I remembered Evita. The movie opens with that extraordinary cinematography of raw Argentinian grief outside the Casa Rosada when Eva Peron died, aged 33, and was 1997’s blockbuster movie:

Ché: It’s our funeral too.

Oh, what a circus, oh, what a show!
Argentina has gone to town over the death of an actress called Eva Peron. We’ve all gone crazy, mourning all day and mourning all night, falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right. Oh, what an exit! That’s how to go.

Thus in Britain, and across the globe just as electronic communications were taking a quantum leap forward, the ancient goddess Diana, Eva Peron, Madonna The Mother of God, and Madonna the pop singer, morphed into one personae in the people’s popular imagination in a process of Darwinian cultural cross-pollination.

There is also something disturbing in the sudden and extreme glamour conferred by an early death. Some great artists die young, but no artist should be rendered great by dying young. Gately and Stead were great artists who died young. It was strange, after reading of Stead’s death, going to his website to view his heart-stopping photographs: images of the mystery of life. Please go there to honour the gentleman and the fact that that just a decade ago we would not have used technology this way.

Yet for a younger generation, early death has acquired a grim and growing allure, founded in the Western cultural veneration of the young dead. I am worried that the notion that self-destruction is “cool” has taken firm root in teenage culture. The websites set up to memorialise the seven young people who killed themselves in South Wales last year spoke of a tragic desire for recognition in death and a sense that the act of suicide is somehow brave. The postings of admiration and respect are entirely heartbreaking, and so wrong. Youth suicide rates are soaring here too. We need to swop the macabre cult of the young dead with the dance of life in the minds of these young people: a love, not of death, but of living for every precious moment.

Those who have come close to ending it, only to survive, will tell you, almost without exception, that they are glad they did not succeed. One never knows what’s around the corner and things tend to get “better in time”. The new generation of antidepressants and sleeping tablets, thank goodness, make it difficult for one to kill oneself by overdosing. But I do fret about their ubiquity and ready availability without, often, addressing the root problem.

The poet Aeschylus wrote of pain: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

For me, the important thing to remember is that pain can shape us and help us grow as people: it can make us reach for life in a way that we never have before. If we have never experienced pain in our lives, then how can we experience happiness? I believe that the more we have experienced the depths of pain, the more our lives become opened to joy. The depths to which we can descend in our pain speak of the heights to which we can soar in our joy. These two extremes are interconnected, and in experiencing the depths or heights of the one it is that experience that opens us up to the depths or heights of the other. The problem, I think, is that while we are experiencing pain we forget that we can experience joy and happiness. They just seem so far away. However, the opposite is also true. In the heights of our happiness we tend to forget that one day we will, once again, be plunged to the depths of pain. I guess one needs to know the curve.

Another thing that we as human beings seem to forget is the redemptive value that pain can bring to our lives. However, if I must be truly honest with myself and with you, then I have to admit that the biggest growth I have seen in my life is when I have experienced a time of pain, and have managed to come through it. And, in the end, it has made me aware of the Xhosa proverb “Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu”: people are people through other people.

Dylan Thomas, dead at 39, urged us to “rage against the dying of the light”. Death should have no dominion, said Saint Paul. Death should leave no glamour, no cachet, only an aching lacuna of what could and should have been. The departed stay ever young. Whoever might read this — and I’ll do it with you — let’s seize the day. It won’t come by again.