A week of prayer
Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal in a scene from her documentary about battling cancer.
With apologies to the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been this week.
Michael Jackson’s death was a shock, even though it was evident from news reports that he was in poor health. Still, you don’t expect the passing of someone you grew up with. My birthday is between Michael’s and his brother Marlon’s, so we were all almost the same age. The Jackson 5 were so much a part of my middle-school years that one of their albums was the first I ever bought for myself. Their Christmas album was the first in my collection of holiday music, too.
I would like to think of Michael Jackson as the super-talented little dynamo in this clip and as the monster hitmaker of Thriller instead of as the pathetic soul he became after his trials for child molestation and his endless plastic surgeries. May God rest his soul.
It was also a week when Farrah Fawcett and TV pitchman Billy Mays died. Farrah, the original Charlie’s Angels pin-up, used to stare at us from my brother’s bedroom during the 1970s, when her poster in a red swimsuit was all the rage. Her feathered hair became a cliche and her mile-wide smile was familiar in countless magazine covers. Her acting improved as she stretched her limits and she was actually very good in The Apostle as Robert Duvall’s wife.
I watched a bit of the documentary she made to document her fatal bout with cancer and I was amazed at how brave she seemed to be as she got weaker and weaker. Anyone who has lost a friend or family member to cancer will identify with the pain and sadness in this program about the ravages of a disease that doesn’t discriminate among the famous or the forgotten. May God grant her peace and eternal rest.
Billy Mays was the commercial king with the booming voice and the Brawny paper towel man physique. We used to laugh at his silly pitches for picture hooks and cleaning products in ads where his voice was louder than a sonic boom. The man seemed made for the mute buttons on our remote controls. He lived in our same small town until recently, when he moved to a more posh part of the Tampa Bay area. He seemed to live and breathe commercial endorsements, but at least he was entertaining — if also loud.
When it was mentioned in our local media that Mays had been hit on the head with luggage from a bad crash landing at Tampa International Airport the day before his death, I was praying that a head injury hadn’t been the cause of death. Our family has suffered two major brain injuries this past year and the world lost Natasha Richardson a similar mishap, so it would have been difficult to see a brain injury take another person. According to today’s autopsy, Mays died of heart disease. May his family be comforted and may he rest in peace.
It’s also been a week when a local arts critic published one of the saddest stories I’ve read recently. The column appeared in The St. Petersburg Times, our hometown daily. It detailed the decline of a former reporter who had lost her job and whose life had disintegrated into homelessness and substance abuse.
My husband pointed out the column because it mentioned that the subject had been a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, where I had covered dance for eight years. Within a couple of paragraphs, I knew who the anonymous reporter was. I’ve been praying for her recovery since I read the column late last night and I’ve asked other media pros in our area to do the same. I will remember how beautiful she was and how good a reporter she was. Let’s pray that she can pick up the pieces of her life and find a way to help others through her gifts and her life experiences.
This week, I’ve also heard that a former co-worker lost her husband and was arrested for a crime that I couldn’t help but think was related to her grief. Life can be so beautiful and it can be so harsh — sometimes within the same hour or day.
Sunday’s reading from the Book of Wisdom seemed apropos to explain the reasons I’ve been praying for those I know and those I didn’t know this week:
Because God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, And there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the nether world on earth,
For justice is undying.
For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him.
But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it.
