Grief, Prince, Bruce and a Lost Friend


This is one of just many musical tributes to the loss of a great artist and since it’s Bruce, it’s especially meaningful to me.

When a celebrity dies, the public memories of respected peers add a kind of emotional gravitas that helps all of us who love the mourner or the mourned – or both.

Personal loss. though, has a weight and impact hotter, sharper and deeper.

Sunday, we went to a “shiva,”a home memorial services held for a friend.  We’d met him and his wonderful wife on a cruise, sailed all through the Mediterranean and had a great time; we were so happy they lived nearby, especially since we  shared so much: they’d been married as long as we have, also had grown kids and grandkids and, it turned out, lived just across San Francisco Bay from us.

Gerri Larry tender fixed2
Gerri and Larry Miller Summer, 2015 Outside Gironda, Sp;ain

Larry was a blast to be around, intense, funny, smart and curious; he and his wife Gerri were a great pair and it was so very hard to see her grieving so intensely.

As I near my 8th decade with very little sense of age, I’m so aware of each loss of a peer and remember my dad telling me with astonishment every time one of his friends left us; it seemed to impossible to him.  Like so many other things, I understand this so much more now.

Of course it’s easier to grieve the loss of a public person, no matter how admired:  the sharp reality of a more personal one, deep feeling for his family and realigning of each memory of them, especially in the years that we become so much more aware of our own mortality, cuts and lingers so much more.

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

6 thoughts on “Grief, Prince, Bruce and a Lost Friend”

  1. Oh Cynthia, I am so sorry for your loss. You’re right; and I think it’s a big reason why people participate in these big, public displays for artists they didn’t know personally. It’s because those close losses hurt so much. Mourning the public ones falls somewhere between practice and alleviating the weight of the personal ones. Holding you in my heart.

  2. Cynthia,
    So sorry for your loss…when yo lose someone at the same time a public person dies, the two experiences reside side-by-side in your memories forever. You cannot hear a reference to one without thinking of the other.

    My family is about to lose a dear relative at any time now, she is struggling with the final trials of breast cancer and has just entered hospice. She has been one of the bravest people I have known..speaking openly and calmly about the end of life and yet filled with enjoyment for the simplest things that have filled her final days….

    So this is what we will all remember her for, and this is what we have learned about living and dying from her. Prince’s demise will always be sad and seem unnecessary, but in the end he was not able to help us appreciate the essence of life as much as our dear cousin… and probably your dear friend.

    We learn from those who make the time to teach us.

    1. Jackie I’m SO sorry! I have seen first hand way too many times the courage of those who struggle to keep breast cancer away just one more day, one more day, one more day, including one of my dearest friends and a much-admired BlogHer sister. We should be out in the streets about this disease. Everyone has lost loved ones — we need to fight for research funding!!!

  3. My condolences to you Cynthia. I think when someone so public who’s talent has been in our lives for decades dies it’s hard because it’s like a part of our younger days went with them. Also, like our parents, they’ve always seemed larger than life & therefore immortal. I’ve always compared my mother’s death to the sun disappearing. If someone whom you trusted completely were to tell you one morning that the sun had exploded overnight, you’d know they’d never make such a thing up but you’d still get up every morning looking for the sun because it just couldn’t be true… Sending love to you…

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