Quote:
Originally Posted by shogged
just wanna talk about the mental health aspect of this news today. For a lot of us, this might be the first celebrity death that hits close to home. we might be asking ourselves why we feel these powerful emotions for someone we didn't know personally.
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This is the third celebrity death that has hit close to home for me.
The first was when Brad McCrimmon went down in that Russian plane crash. It seemed unreal that ‘Sarge’, whom I remembered so vividly from the '89 Cup run, who served as captain of the Flames and later came back as an assistant coach, just wasn't here anymore.
The second had nothing to do with hockey: Dave Wolverton (who also wrote as David Farland), the well-known fantasy writer. He was a mentor of mine for a while (and mentored a lot of writers you've actually heard of, too, such as Stephenie Meyer, the author of
Twilight). Late in 2021 he was hired by a major publisher to start and edit a new fantasy line for them, and I was spoiling for a chance to work with him again. Less than a month later, he fell down a flight of stairs and died of a brain injury. That one
still feels unreal (but makes me nervous when I'm going down my own stairs).
This one? What seems to hurt most is the way we all found out about it – from some Joe Schmuckatelli on social media, who had no right to blab about it and no credibility, but turned out to be telling the truth. It took me back to my twenties, when a friend of mine committed suicide. I found out by a phone call the following day, when a mutual friend phoned me:
‘Did you hear about Reed?’ he asked.
‘No, what happened?’
‘He woke up this morning and he was dead,’ said Mr. Tact.
I don't believe in shooting the messenger, but when the messenger makes it about himself instead of the message, I am very strongly tempted. Johnny Hockey deserved better, and his family
needed better, than to have his death announced by a self-promoting twerp on the Internet. That made it hurt even worse.