Tag Archives: Mourning

We’re Only Worth Who We Know

I’d never heard of Amie Harwick before today. I’d only vaguely paid attention to the name Drew Carey. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to identify them, or said what they were known for. A friend posted on Facebook this morning about her death, and it was odd because the headline spoke of her as the latter’s ex-fiancée. It was hard for me to understand why I should care about the ex-fiancée of a second-tier celebrity I barely knew.

I had to do some digging to discover that Amie Harwick is a therapist in Hollywood, primarily focused on sex and relationships. She had helped a great number of people with overcoming abuse and difficult mental health issues, and was apparently killed by a former boyfriend, Gareth Pursehouse, against whom she had had a restraining order.

It seems to have been a senseless, tragic death, but the fact is I only know about it because of a tangential connection to someone the media thinks people care about. If she hadn’t once been engaged to Drew Carey, it would have been a second-tier back page new article, or possibly just an obituary.

Of course, people die every day. People are murdered, commit suicide, die of old age … it’s literally part of the world, and part of life. It isn’t possible to be as upset about the death of a stranger as it is about the death of a loved one. But, when someone with a greater sphere of influence dies, there are naturally a wider range of people who are affected by it. Think of when Robin Williams died, or more recently, Kobe Bryant. Their families were presumably devastated, but so was the world.

It seems that the greatest celebrities in the world – those with the greatest influence over strangers they’ve never met – are entertainers. Perhaps it makes sense that we mourn our entertainers the most; after all, they provide us escape from the pain of the world around us. But when someone who truly did the world good, who made life better for other people through their dedication and work, it seems unfair that they aren’t mourned for their work, but rather for who they were in relation to others who were better known than they were.

What’s particularly upsetting is that most new outlets seem not to have even bothered to reference who she was; only who she knew. Her worth to the media was in her relationship to a comedian – an entertainer. Not even an active relationship – a past one.

It’s enough to make me wonder – who am I? Am I myself, a person of my own with my own virtues and values? Am I just a husband? Am I a father? What is it that defines me?

I can’t pretend to have answers to these questions – they’re going to be different for every individual, of course. But it just seems sad to me to only be known as an attachment to some other person, as if you were owned by them, a part of them, and not a whole person of your own. And this sadness only enhances the tragedy of death, because it devalues who the person was in life.

Amie Harwick was a therapist, a child, and adult, and a whole person of her own. She deserves to be mourned for her own death, and not someone else’s loss.

Thoughts of the Unfinished

Last week I lost a good friend to cancer.

You can read my tribute to him at cmnorthauthor.com, but I really wanted to take a moment to reflect on what his death means in terms of the loss of creative endeavors. You see, for years we would talk about making and creating, during lunchtime walks and in snarky texts. We would discuss what we wanted to achieve, the difference we wanted to make, and how depression would often stand in the way of our goals.

But in the end, only one of us got there. For the last two years, his focus narrowed to simple survival. And while I wrote and published books, he slowly withered.

I know that I write to communicate; I write to help, and to change lives. With my fantasy work I might only do that in the minutest of ways – entertaining people, keeping their thoughts off the stresses of their lives – but it gives me a sense of purpose.

It also helps me come to terms with my own mortality, because of course one day I’m going to die, too. And I want to know that I’ve left something behind – something tangible, something to remember me by.

When I think of his death, I’m saddened, of course; I’m saddened for the loss of his presence, his influence on me, and I’m saddened for the grief of all those who loved him. But I’m also saddened at the thought of all the things he’ll never get to do. He’ll never play a new video game; he’ll never write his book. He’ll never know the ending of The Redemption of Erâth – something I would speak with him about frequently. All the new things that might have brought him joy will never be his to experience.

But they are still mine; they are all of ours left behind. There are so many new things yet to come, and old things never experienced, and it would be a waste of life not to seek those things out. I can’t pretend that his death changes my own creative endeavors; I had always planned on finishing my series, and writing more beyond. But maybe it gives a new flavor to my motivation: the knowledge that there are people in the world who may not have forever left to them makes me want to push forward all the more.

So if there is something that can grow from his death, let it be the experiences that remain in the world for all of us. Don’t wait until tomorrow to watch that movie, or write that book. Do something today, and make it matter: if only to yourself.

Because in the end, all we have are the experiences that form our lives. The day will come when you run out of time, when the only experience left is the final one that we’re all fated to go through. But until that day, live. Live happy, or live sad, but don’t delay it another moment.

My friend – I know how your story ended, and I’m sorry you’ll never know how mine does. But it will, and when it does, it will be everything we ever dreamed.