Get used to the obituaries

described because they were part of a massive population boom.

As this large group of young’uns grew up, the subset among them who became famous was itself proportionately greater. Now this lot are more emphatically entering the dying years. Sorry, but there it is. Naturally, we particularly notice it when people we know, or know of, die comparatively young.

But it’s always been the case that some do.

We’re more primed to react personally when their work affected our lives.

David Bowie was 69, but for so many people who were teenaged in the 1970s, even early 1980s, he was a touchstone of the music of their own youth. Fisher was only 60, but her global fame was 40 years old; and recently revived, big-time.

Prince was 57. George Michael 53. Again, for those among us who are now in their 40s, this was the music of their own youth.

Now we’re getting into the ranks of the Generation Xers. A bit young to be dying in statistically significant numbers. But they’re not doing that.

We’re just noticing the famous ones because the sheer pervasiveness of celebrity culture has meant they’re more consistently present in our lives.

The assumption will so often be that stellar-but-youngish deaths due to lifestyle excesses and overmedicational tendencies.

On occasion, sure, but the corrosions of commonplace illness are also increasingly coming to the fore.

And this is going to keep happening. The discomforting feeling that many have been aware of this year – the dying of people we grew up with – is going to keep coming, and relentlessly.

To an extent it was the same for our parents and their parents.

But now it’s happening thicker and faster because we are sensitised to so many more public lives.

There’s another reason, a very good one, why we tend to take these deaths so personally.

They carry intimations of our own mortality.

We’re all ageing.