Flowers and messages left by fans in front of the David Bowie mural in Brixton Photograph by Han Yan/Xinhua Press/Corbis

 

by Suzanne Moore The Guardian

For some, a hole has been ripped in the universe and we are lost. Our sadness doesn’t mean we don’t care about Madaya or Istanbul – but what if there is never anyone else like him?

OCTOBER 01: RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL  David BOWIE live onstage, Philly Dogs Tour | Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns | Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty

Time takes a cigarette and puts it your mouth. Did that happen? I think it happened, as I reacquaint myself with the nausea of the first fag in a while. Grief is so physical, isn’t it? The discombobulation, that slightly floaty feeling in your legs, a gutful of dread. I know what grief feels like, thanks very much. And I grieve for David Bowie. It’s not a competition. It’s not just about “music”. Or my lost youth. My youth went the day I gave birth at 26 and I understood that everything was about the next generation. And Bowie was always about what could be. A rift has opened between those who know and those who don’t.

I consider myself lucky to have so many compadres of all ages who do know. We are a little afraid of that knowledge these days. We are vaguely aware that we won’t live for ever, but somehow we thought he might. In some new incarnation. We are in denial, maybe.
But it’s not the denial of the naysayers, who function in a most peculiar way. There is a constant refrain of discomfort about public mourning from the zombified bourgeoisie who are fearful of crowds. Fearful of feelings. The joyous celebrations in Brixton were spontaneous. Still the bitter mumblings about the “Dianafication” of England. I wonder if some of these people take Ubers to random funerals and then correct the mourners on the permissible level of emotion. I guess they learn this stuff in public school, where they are taught to confuse empathy with incontinence.

Certainly I got ticked off by several such types when Diana did die and I went to her funeral. I adored her – not because I thought she was Gloria Steinham or a closet republican because she wanted her son to be king instead of Charles – but because she was so brilliantly disruptive. She simply would not accept the royal script: that Charles would keep a mistress and barely see his children. She made her distress clear. She did not want to breed in captivity.

So in 1997, when she died, I had to tell the editor of the paper I worked for at the time that people were genuinely upset. Because they were. Not in a stupid way. Many I spoke to were crying for her, her sons, and for their own losses. They articulated that clearly. This was signalling a cultural shift. Candles and flowers. A Protestant country looked like a Catholic one. Or, sometimes, it was like being in India. For one week, more anti-monarchy feeling gathered than had ever been present in all the hours I spent sitting in meetings about the need for a new constitution.

At the service in Westminster Abbey, when Earl Spencer made his dissident speech to the royals, we thought we could hear rain. It was the gathering applause outside. Nonetheless, people like me were “hysterics”. Saint Christopher Hitchens claimed this mass grief was compulsory (it wasn’t) and called it “a one-party state”. The so-called left is fairly disgusted by the feelings of ordinary folk. Just like the right. This is passed off as a kind of iconoclasm. How very radical not to care about the death of a young mother in a car crash.

So I feel the same about people deriding those who are mourning Bowie. I don’t care if you don’t care. More fool you. For some, a hole has been ripped in the universe and we are lost, and we will be for a good while yet. We are afraid. For he was so damn smart and yet formed in the laboratory of creative social mobility, which we fear is also gone now. If we cannot reconstruct it, we just don’t know where the new visionaries will be grown.

That’s the social part, but the personal part is well … not just his life. We have his life to replay over and over. But his death, the turning of his ending into something full of awe and humanity, is breathtaking. Most people in the last days of cancer cannot get dressed, let alone produce sounds and vision that sear our souls. You see, we are troubled by what we now feel he was telling us and what we chose not to know. We are troubled by the fact that, in talking of his death, we are talking of our own. He once said: “I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.” Yes.

“Aint that just like me,” he sings. The last line of Lazarus. How many of us ever know what we are like or how to die?

It’s a pretty big question for a mere “pop star” to pose. So I am still reeling in that grey space he spoke of, between audience and performer. I am not coping, to be honest. Nor are many other people I know. I have never felt like this about any other public death and doubt I will again. What if there is never anyone else like him? My sadness does not mean I don’t care about Madaya or Istanbul. But this grief is serious and rational.

Bowie was incomparable. Leave us be with it. There is always one damn song that can make you break down and cry. I am sorry if you never heard it. Because I did.