Why it’s OK to feel sad when someone you don’t know dies
You’ve seen them on telly, you’ve followed their social media, so, writes Kevin Norquay, there are plenty of reasons why it’s normal to mourn when they pass away.
Out on the mid-West prairie, 231 years after the United States cut ties from British royalty, the Kansas college town Manhattan erected a memorial to Princess Diana, who had never been there.
It may seem laughable for an American railroad city to commemorate the death of a distant royal, but it's not, says Professor Richard Harris, from Kansas State University.
‘‘It is called ‘parasocial interaction/ relationship' and is a real phenomenon,'' the psychology professor says, in the wake of an outpouring of emotion over the sudden death of Shane Warne, 52, which has stretched far beyond cricket fans.
‘‘People develop meaningful relationships with famous people they have never met. That person's death can be traumatic,'' says Harris.
He uses the example of Princess Diana's death in 1997, which was mourned worldwide. Manhattan, Kansas, was his hometown. He saw the shrine on campus that memorialised her.
‘‘It was a real loss, although not always recognised as such by others.''
When a famous person such as Princess Diana, who was 36, dies, it is difficult for those who feel a sense of loss to know where to put their grief. The closer they feel, the more difficult it is.
‘‘Society has rituals for grieving family members and friends, but not for parasocial deaths. People might just laugh at someone, but their loss is real,'' Harris says.
‘‘The loss is greater if the death was unexpected, and perhaps if the person was relatively young.
‘‘The reactions vary so much, depending on the relationship of the person to the famous figure. If they identified with them a lot, the loss is more difficult. If they barely followed the person, it's no big deal.''
So, if the death of Warne last weekend shook you, that's fair. If it shocked you, that's fair too. You can be sad, even if you never met him, or don't understand the difference between a googly, a zooter, a flipper and a slider.
It's been more than a week since variations on the words ‘‘OMG, Shane Warne is dead'' echoed down halls and into rooms, while the internet, radio and TV buzzed with the news Warne had been dismissed before his time.
The yellers, texters and social media posters need not have been from cricket households, scholars of how to spin a cricket ball, or have even met Warne.
Parasocial bonds are one-way relationships in which people feel connected to someone famous.
Public figures such as Princess Diana, David Bowie or Steve Irwin, and significant deaths such as Shane Warne's have the power to mobilise and create ‘communities of mourning', says University of Waikato Te Kura Toi (School of Arts) head Professor Gareth Schott.
“Often this involves a pilgrimage to a significant site, in this case a statue of Warne outside Melbourne Cricket Ground, where mourners can gather and pay their respects, lay flowers, cards or notes.
”Public displays of mourning can also be grief signalling ... a means to signal to others that we are committed to a particular group, cause, or identity.
“We let other people know, typically on social media, that we were/are fans of a sport or team, and have lived through key events or sporting moments associated with that person as well.”
We know celebrities are not really our friends, but when we see them so often and have so much information about them, they can feel like friends, so if they die we grieve.
Psychologists have seen parasocial
‘‘We don’t have the social structures and support for grieving the loss of a media character or, in particular, a fictional character.’’ Professor Richard Harris
interaction time-and-again. It rears up at social events in the form of questions such as ‘‘where were you when Elvis died?’’, or, Jonah Lomu, Princess Diana, Norman Kirk, Sir Peter Blake, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Robin Williams, or Whitney Houston?
When their deaths generate strong emotions, it’s not all about them, it’s about you, psychologists say. When you have never met the Mighty Fallen To¯ tara, or know their families, it can’t be otherwise.
We all must die, so we all have our own stories about death and mortality. How long we should live, what order should family and friends leave us, do we wish to linger longer and have the chance to say goodbye, or go out like a light?
How a celebrity dies is measured up against those wishes and our own fears. Is dying in a plane crash worse than being claimed by a shark, a saltwater crocodile or a nuclear missile?
Seeing an idol die can make death seem even more likely for us, Dr Samantha Cacace of North Carolina State University has suggested.
As well, the death or serious illness of a celebrity forces us to consider if awful things happen to famous people, they can happen to us too. And we don’t like the insecurity.
When someone younger than we are, and seemingly still vital dies, that triggers a broad range of emotions.
Princess Diana is an example. We were not privy to the state of her private life – it seemed she was young, beautiful and leading a productive post-royal life.
Her unexpected death sparked an outpouring of grief not witnessed in the United Kingdom for generations.
The 1965 funeral of World War II leader Sir Winston Churchill, then the largest state funeral held, was less personal. Mourners had expected Churchill to die, and Princess Diana to live.
‘‘People say ‘it can’t be!’ It’s shock, and people want to be part of it,’’ one psychologist told the Sunday Star-Times.
At times, it’s as if the world stops to mark the passing of a person who sparkled and lit up lives, as was the case when Jonah Lomu died in 2015.
Global rugby giant Lomu, who had been diagnosed as having kidney damage in 1995, died of a heart attack related to kidney disease while New Zealand was still basking in its 2015 Rugby World Cup win.
His death was marked with headlines across the world, and even interrupted the Southwark Crown Court trial of cricketer Chris Cairns, who was later found not guilty of perjury.
When the sad news arrived, lawyers who had been ruthlessly cross-examining witnesses, greeted Kiwi reporters covering the trial with condolences over the death of Lomu. Then it was back to incourt hostilities.
Most people have clear memories of where they were when the death shockwaves struck. The Sunday Star-Times asked former prime ministers Helen Clark and Sir John Key, for their moments, as well as author Charlotte Grimshaw whose memoir, The Mirror Book isa finalist in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Key and Grimshaw both opted for Princess Diana; Key was working in London at the time while Grimshaw was roaming Spain.
‘‘We were walking in Barcelona when I noticed pictures of her everywhere. I said, ‘These people are obsessed with Diana.’ When we got back to the hotel and turned on BBC News, the presenters were in black and near tears, and we learned that she’d died,’’ Grimshaw remembers.
‘‘Later we drove from Barcelona to Madrid. It was more than 40 degrees outside and we drove over the bare, scorched landscape listening to her funeral on the radio. It was very dramatic, and I remember the intensity of her brother Earl Spencer’s speech.’’
Clark named Norman Kirk, who died in 1974 aged 51 when New Zealand Prime Minister, the 1963 assassination of United States president John F Kennedy, 46, and the 2002 death of the Queen Mother as deaths that left a mark.
As well as Princess Diana, Key listed pop star Michael Jackson (50, 2009): ‘‘From memory, I heard a news flash on TV, I just remember thinking what a troubled life for such a gifted musician’’ and former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who died in 2016 aged 74.
Key had met Ali, and the man called ‘‘The Greatest’’ left a mental mark on him, having in the 1970s left a physical mark on the likes of George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton.
Others who left their mark on Grimshaw was Auckland writer Frank Sargeson, who died in early 1982. A short story writer and novelist, Sargeson is charged with introducing the rhythms and idiom of everyday New Zealand speech into literature.
‘‘We’d been protesting against the Springbok Tour, and Frank wrote to Janet Frame in his final letter: ‘All the Stead family have been prosecuted and fined over the Springboks – even down to the little girl – most improper!!!’
‘‘I remember being told he’d died, sitting at the kitchen table and discussing what he’d said to my father in a moment of lucidity, ‘Christ, the deterioration’s been so rapid!’ He also, at a late point, told my father that he didn’t like living under ‘the new regime’.’’
For Grimshaw, the death of South African antiapartheid revolutionary and political leader Nelson Mandela in December 2013, is even more poignant, given the events of the past month.
‘‘I heard on the radio that Nelson Mandela had died, and I remembered the months we’d spent protesting against the Springbok Tour,’’ she says.
‘‘It was a kind of satisfaction to know that Mandela had spoken of his gratitude to New Zealanders who’d protested.
‘‘At that time, as it happens, Ukrainians were staging huge protests against their Russian-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovych. Those seemed to me legitimate protests, and recent events have proved they were.
‘‘Dying stars from the 90s are more available in memory than living stars, which makes us feel like almost everyone we loved in the 90s is dying, which is distressing.’’ Dr Jaye Derrick
Parasocial interaction has been enhanced by TV and social media, yet far precedes it, with the death of New Zealand Prime Minister Michael Joseph ``Micky’’ Savage in 1940 an example.
After the popular Savage died in office on 27 March, 1940, his body lay in state at Parliament for two days, then his funeral corte` ge – which was more than 1.6 kilometres long, headed to Wellington railway station. His was the longest funeral procession, and the most striking outpouring of public grief, in New Zealand history, as the funeral train took 28 hours to transport his casket and official mourners to Auckland.
There were reportedly 20 stops along the route, with crowds of up to 12,000 people filing past and laying wreaths.
The train’s progress was broadcast on radio, and then 200,000 lined the route of his corte` ge from central Auckland to his burial site at Bastion Point (Takaparawha).
For sports fans, the past two weeks have been tough. First Va’aiga ``Inga the winger’’ Tuigamala died at 52, then All Black Joeli Vidiri, at just 48.
Across the Tasman Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh – who famously kept wicket in the 1981 underarm game against New Zealand – gone at 74. And days later, Warne.
That’s a mental hit for Australasian sports fans, psychologists would argue – four mental hits, in fact. Celebrity deaths can make it seem like everyone from our youth is dying.
But they’re not, says Dr Jaye Derrick of the University of Houston.
``We can easily think of stars from the 90s who have died because their deaths were in the news. But we haven’t been thinking about stars from the 90s who haven’t died,’’ she says. ``Dying stars from the 90s are more available in memory than living stars, which makes us feel like almost everyone we loved in the 90s is dying, which is distressing.’’
Oh, and finally – yes, you can mourn people who aren’t real, Professor Harris says. After all, you might spend more time with say the cast of Friends, than you do your real friends.
``People can, if the drama is particularly well acted and written, identify with the characters. That’s a significant relationship,’’ Harris says.
``We don’t have the social structures and support for grieving the loss of a media character or, in particular, a fictional character.
``Somebody’s real upset that their favourite soap opera character was killed off yesterday, and they tell someone about that, and they laugh. It’s a very different reaction than if their grandmother had died.’’
Good grief!