I don’t normally get teary over the death of celebrities. Just out of recent far-too-young deaths, Amy Winehouse and Philip Seymour Hoffman have contributed far more to life than the rest of us ever will, and yet I was a bit sad, rather than losing-it sobbing, for those two.
Peaches Geldof wasn’t an artist on either of their scale. As far as I’m aware, she was a perfectly competent TV presenter – but not of shows that I’d consider watching in a million years, or indeed ever have watched. And yet despite me being fully aware of this, her death yesterday hit me harder than any dead celebrity I can remember. To the point of actual sobbing.
It’s always projection, and sure, this is projection. When Peaches lost her mum aged 11, I was 20 and had lost my mum aged 10 – so I was aware of what it was like to group up having lost your mum at that age from my own experience, even before you factor in the press vultures who followed her around for her entire life.
The single thing that felt worst, in my mind at the time**, about my mum’s death was the way it was reported as a top headline in the local newspaper (which I suspect is part of why I hate small towns and rejoice in the destruction of local newspapers. Big cities, where nobody knows your business unless they are your friend or you are actually famous, are the way forward). Multiply that by all of the newspapers, all of the time, forever, and you get Peaches’ entire life. Imagining how anyone could cope with that is painful.
On top of that starting point, there’s the sheer compressedness of her life. While I’ve done whatever I’ve been up to in the 15 years since Paula Yates died (which feels like about last week, and has mostly consisted of writing about things, sometimes for money), Peaches has gone from a child who lost her mum, to being the mum of two kids who are now in the same place she was 15 years ago, and that I was in 25 years ago.
But understanding the reasons why this pushes my trigger-buttons doesn’t make feel it any less real. Yesterday I was genuinely upset, to a level I rarely reach about anything, about the death of a total stranger. Suddenly some of my sneery judginess about the people who went full-mourning crazy for Princess Di feels a bit less clever and a bit more twattish.
(I’m not going to send flowers to a total stranger’s funeral, or swear at people on the internet for not caring about a stranger’s death, though. I think that’s probably still a boundary everyone would do well to maintain.)
* I hope neither Peaches would mind the title.
** The mind of a 10-year-old is a stupid place, but this is the single thing that I was most able to deal with and be cross about at the time.