Six months later, Prince superfans still in mourning
All fans miss his music but the trendsetting star meant much more to some
NEW YORK— Have you ever missed someone so much that even the thought of them made you burst into tears?
Now imagine that feeling drenched in purple rain.
Nearly six months after the shocking death of Prince, some superfans are still grieving hard, creating tearful memes, snapping up “I Still Miss Prince” T-shirts, sharing photos and seeking solace in an explosion of fresh concert videos and unreleased music on YouTube.
They see no end in sight to their sadness, especially with regular Prince developments in the news: details on the death investigation, his house being turned into a museum and Thursday’s official tribute concert in his hometown of Minneapolis.
Maria Newport still cries regularly over the loss. She broke up with her boyfriend soon after Prince was found dead April 21. When she heard about it, “I just started wailing. Like, fetal position, in my bed.”
As for the boyfriend, she said he didn’t get it.
“He could not understand. He couldn’t understand the pain,” Newport said of the guy she had been seeing for about a year and thought she would marry. “He would say, ‘This is the dumbest thing ever. Like, you’ve never met this man.’ ”
Jazz buff Cheryl Emerson, at 66, doesn’t fit the traditional Prince demographic but she, too, is profoundly saddened by the loss.
“My heart’s still broken,” she said. “Why? Why wasn’t there someone there to prevent it, to help him, to see what he was doing, to give him advice?”
She was referring to Prince’s accidental painkiller overdose at 57, after decades of residual pain from epic live performances that had him madly jumping off pianos, doing multiple splits and — to these fans — giving them everything he had.
Although Prince’s brilliance as a musician is what many fans miss most, his loss means something more to his devoted followers.
Cheryl Emerson appreciated what he meant for black people, his trailblazing ways and, in particular, his battles for artists’ rights.
“We were proud that he was fighting the system when he was writing ‘SLAVE’ on his face and changed his name to the symbol and all of that,” she explained.
Brooks Brown, a 44-year-old lesbian living in Albany, N.Y., recalls being drawn to the androgynous Prince when she was growing up in Alabama, appreciating him as someone to identify with.
“He was so gender fluid and kind of race fluid, too.,” said Brown, a web administrator for an education nonprofit.
Brown first saw Prince live in 2004. Worthy saw him several times. Newport saw him just one time, at his final show in Atlanta, but her friend, Margo Davis, a 40-year-old human resources manager, can barely count the number of Prince shows she enjoyed, including some of his famous after-parties.
Newport and Davis check in with each other regularly on the Prince front.
“She’ll send me a random text and say, you know, ‘Today is just a bad one.’ And I’m, like, I get it,” Newport said, melting into tears. “I don’t know how I’ll come out from under this cloud.”