A
light year is the length of time it takes for light to travel from its source
to Earth. A star that shines a hundred light years away can die, but the light will
continue to shine for a century before we’ll see it go out.
A lot
of stars have gone out this year. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Leonard Cohen.
Prince. George Michael. (That one hurt more than the others put together because
I have more of his albums than I do of all the others put together.) Then, in
tragically quick succession, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It seems to me
that a mass exodus is happening, but I may only be so aware of it because these
famous names are a part of my generation; after all, thousands of people die
every day and most of us don’t even blink. At least the famous ones leave
behind a legacy of work that keeps them alive in the hearts of their fans.
Truth
is, the world is always a little bit darker when someone dies.
I
like to watch Jeopardy! to test my
memory banks and see how far out of the loop I’ve fallen with regard to pop
culture. Once in a while, I’ll take an inexplicable shine to a contestant and
root for that person through victory after victory. Halfway through December, a
quiet young woman named Cindy Stowell won her first game and took her place as
the defending champion. Her run took her through six wins and over $100,000,
before she was inevitably defeated. She gave Ter and me more than one heart
attack over the course of her appearance—she wasn’t always quick with the
buzzer, but she consistently came back from the red to win the game with a
clever bet on the Daily Double or knowing the answer to an obscure Final
Jeopardy question. And she never lost her cool. She was a little mouse with big
eyes and dark hair, a shy smile and sweet demeanour. Something about her was
delightful and fragile and made you want to cheer for her.
On
her seventh appearance, at the start of the game, Alex Trebek mentioned that
her goal had been to win $100,000 and she had accomplished this with her
previous win. My radar pinged with an uh
oh, and sure enough, regrettably, she lost her seventh game. At the end of
that show, however, a clip of Mr Trebek came up after the credits, in which he
explained that, during the filming of Cindy’s shows a few weeks earlier, she
had been fighting stage four cancer. She lost her battle with it on December 5,
almost two weeks before her shows aired. In short, she had already departed
when her championship run was broadcast.
Like
a little star whose light took a few weeks to wink out of our sky.
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