The greatest recording artist of all time and the dominant fantasy woman of two decades of American life died today, Thursday, June 25, 2009. On the way to their rest, they followed not too far behind the hero of Kung Fu, a man who himself had become enough of a mystery that a great film was built around metacasting him.

I would wish none of their three deaths on my worst enemy. These were not people who died “ripe” in the way of pre-Shakespearean Lear, surrounded by family and friends and comforted that their lives were taken neither cruelly nor too soon. For their reasons, these were ugly deaths. I will not go into further detail on them, but it bears note, because in our day of media saturation, this is a big part of their stories and what these lives, looking back, mean to all of us.

When Bea Arthur passed, I felt I lost someone I knew. As a performer, she connected with people on the level of a cogent internal and external identity. She crafted human characters in a way that reinforced our mutual humility and dignity. Performers often comfort us by shedding light on the mysteries of identity and stitching together the broken parts of our common experience. Watching Bea Arthur act, and hearing she died, made it easy to be human.

Losing Michael Jackson like this, Farrah Fawcett like this, and David Carradine like this does no such thing.