Without making a macabre tally, it feels like 2016 took more than its fair share of the gifted and talented from us: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen and, most recently, singer George Michael and actor/author Carrie Fisher followed by her mother, Debbie Reynolds, just to name-check some of those who died this year.
Many clearly felt the losses keenly, poring over their obituaries, sharing their emotions on social media and, in some cases, experiencing the grief more commonly associated with the passing of a family member.
![Gone too soon: Carrie Fisher as <i>Star Wars'</i> Princess Leia.](/web/20170211215259im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/h/k/q/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtj5vd.png/1482988994349.jpg)
As usual the cynics chimed in, too, moaning about "celebrity culture" and "recreational grieving": why, they ask, would you feel genuinely upset about the death of somebody you've never even met? Why do you care about a single celebrity but not the murdered children in Aleppo? They're ploddingly right, of course, but they're missing the point.
Passionate fans can feel real grief: psychologists call their oddly one-sided relationship with celebrities "parasocial attachment", and they can react as if they have lost somebody genuinely close to them. But it's also normal for the rest of us, who might only have a passing interest in the departed celebrity, to feel something too: sadness, ennui, even a mild shock when we hear that somebody we at least knew of, if not knew, has shuffled off.
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At its simplest it's a banal reminder that death comes for us all, that even the wealthy, famous and powerful are not immune. It's a light tap on our own shoulder from the Grim Reaper – "don't worry, I'll get around to you too, sooner or later."
It is the "sooner" that worries us? The passing of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Kardashian of her day, at 99 is a curiosity, a memo from another time and place. But George Michael was just 53, barely into middle age. Prince, 57. Carrie Fisher, dead following a heart attack at 60. Bowie, hardly old at 69, still recording just days before his death. It's discomfiting to hear that somebody you'd assumed was a fixture, a lodestar in your own life, now isn't.
Perhaps allowing ourselves to feel sadness at the passing of a complete stranger is an outlet for pain and hurt that we've buried. But it runs deeper. We've all been affected by an album, or a song, or a film, or a novel: culture that has touched us.
Carrie Fisher, Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, George Michael: these people created something that made us feel, or helped us understand ourselves, or supported us in a time of emotional need. When they die, that little piece of you resonates, too. It's more than nostalgia: you're grieving for a period in your own life, the time when that person meant something to you, for the doors that have now closed.
It's not about who's more deserving of mourning. Nor is it, for most of us, anything like real bereavement, as anyone who suffered a personal loss in 2016 knows. But we're all searching for meaning, and when the people who give us that, who help us to feel that life is worth living, are taken away, we need to make sense of it as best we can. To all who we lost in 2016, RIP.