Ryan Shuck ⚛️🔬🏳️‍🌈

As a 40-year-old man, I try to understand why celebrity deaths hit me so hard. I am a grown man. I have built a family and a community I love. Surely the deaths of people I have never met or interacted with shouldn’t affect me to the point of grief. Today, when I heard of Sir Patrick Stewart’s passing, I realised something. It’s not just the person. It’s the moment they came into our lives. For us millennials, TV and cinema were a very different experience. It was mass media at its truest. Today? We live with different algorithms and feeds. My wife follows celebrities and influencers I have never even heard of, recommending Netflix shows that never even pop up on my “you should watch” feed. But growing up? Catherine O’Hara was everyone’s mum. Robin Williams was everyone’s Mrs. Doubtfire and Mork. Anthony Bourdain was everyone’s guide to food. Matthew Perry was everyone’s Friend living next door. Hayden Panettiere was the cheerleader we all wanted to save. And Sir Patrick Stewart was everyone’s Captain. We saw them at the same time, on the same channels, at much the same ages. This grief we feel is a collective one. We grieve the characters we shared our time with, who made their way from screen to heart. We grieve that time we no longer have, and the childhoods we can’t quite recreate for the next generation. And perhaps the largest grief of all? The feeling that the last pieces of our inner child are fading away with every loss. These people helped us understand the world. Their stories make up the mosaic of our souls. They shaped our understanding of right and wrong, and of what the world sorely needs right now… empathy. I don’t know what lies ahead of us. I just know that I must boldly go. Let’s, together, Make it so.