I was just shy of my eighth birthday when Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. His was the first celebrity death — possibly the first death, period — that I can recall being aware of and understanding as death, i.e., the permanent state we’re all doomed to achieve sooner or later, which those we leave behind experience as loss and pain. It was, with no exaggeration, a transformative event in my life. You want to know the origins of my compulsive obituary-writing? Blame Elvis Presley. Or more precisely, blame the way our culture responded to his passing.
I actually wrote my very first dead-celebrity tribute for Elvis. I had this red leatherette agenda book, the sort of thing businesspeople scribbled their appointments in before the advent of Day Planners, PDAs, and BlackBerries, a piece of branded corporate swag. It was given to me by our neighbor’s adult daughter, who worked for an airline. I imagine she thought I’d enjoy looking at the photos of jets that were interspersed between the calendar pages. (She was correct, of course.) But even at that early age, I was trying to express myself in written words, to record the things that seemed to matter. In other words, I was dabbling at keeping my first diary in that book. And on a page dated August 16, 1977, I was inspired to write the following in the shaky, block-printed letters of a young boy who hated to practice his penmanship: GOODBYE ELVIS, WE’LL MISS YOU. (I think I probably stole that from Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcast that day, but hey, I had to learn how to say these things from someone, right?)
