When hearing of Kurt Cobain's untimely, but not surprising, suicide 1n 1994, my initial reaction wasn't grief or shock, but fear that this would be one of those"defining moments" of my generation. Like the Baby Boomers before us had Elvis and John Lennon, two iconic figures whose lives were cut short, I had that first taste "Wow, life's short." But a suicide, while sad and tragic, is only a blip on the radar screen of life, and we expect out idols to live at least long enough to experience that awesome comeback tour. The ones that don't took Neil Young's advice a little too seriously.

As Generation X shrugs toward forty, more of our childhood idols are fading away rather burning out. Let's face it, we're getting old. In a summer that has already seen the deaths of John Hughes, Farrah Fawcette, most recently Patrick Swayze, and the two-month long media spectacle of Michael Jackson's drug-fueled passing, last week, poet and punk-pioneer (and inspiration for the movie The Basketball Diaries), Jon Carroll died unexpectedly from a heart attack at age 60. Holly Gleason from American Songwriter writes:

He knew about people who died, about compromises without choice, about sullying oneself for a vicious habit that made ones muscles flinch back with a force almost stronger than he could cognitively muster. It was terrifying. It made me feel more alive.

Carrie Brownstein from NPR's Monitor Mix:

Jim Carroll was on the same bill as us. He was tall and lithe, with a ghostly, otherworldly mien. Carroll was reading poems with no back-up band, no team, no amp to crank to up to 10. But he didn't have any problems covering the stage, reaching the corners and permeating the room.

Has this summer been particularly "deathy?" Kate Harding writes for Jezebel:

Since the news of Swayze's passing hit Twitter last night, I've seen a ton of people reiterating a sentiment that's been floating around at least since Jackson and Fawcett went within 24 hours of each other: 2009 is the year of shocking celebrity deaths! Michael, Farrah, Walter, John, Patrick. Jim Carroll. Dominick Dunne. Gidget the Taco Bell dog. It's as though some cruel virus is making its way through Celebrityland, robbing us of our icons.

The only pattern here is that people die — and a lot of us have finally gotten old enough to "know" and really miss the ones who do. The older we get, the more we recognize the names of the dead, the more we recall first seeing them on screen, the more we have to say about the meaning of their absence — and the more every season, every year, will feel like it deserves an "...of Death" title. That's not a new trend. It's just what happens when you're lucky enough to keep living.

Well said.

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