where’s karol wojtyla when you need ‘im?

This blog is a response sparked by my dear friend Sam, and his recent article – “Jade Goody – are we taking celebrity culture too far?” A warning for anyone who might be grieving – this is a candid discussion of, amongst other things, death, and you may want to skip it. Another acknowledgment before I begin is the reminder both to myself and those reading, that despite the mask of celebrity, Jade Goody is in fact not a fictional product of the media but a real woman of flesh and blood, in real time and space, dealing with real and frightening issues as we sit and ponder. I want to try to be sensitive to that as I write.

It’s a good musing, Sam, and I think that your questioning has helped me put a shape on what I’ve been thinking (or perhaps only simply feeling) since the news about Goody’s illness first hit the headlines. Working as I do in a hospice, we talk daily of dying and death as a result of cancer. I chat to dying patients and their families on the phone and sometimes see them in their very last stages in the In-Patient Unit, and of course am privy to the everyday stresses, strains and occasional tears of the team of nurses that I serve. It’s about as interesting and worthy as a part-time job to pay for college can be. But it does make you ponder the nature of dying with dignity.

In relation to this discussion what I have learned might be that perhaps when you have a measure of control over the process of your own dying and death (which is in fact a privilege), that your death is ultimately only a reflection of how you have lived.  You see this in the hospice: those who have lived chaotic and aggressive lives die in chaotic and aggressive settings. I’m not talking about karma, people, I’m talking about the circumstances, chances and perhaps least importantly, the choices of those who die of diagnosed terminal illnesses.

As such, it would seem that Jade Goody’s life is coming to an end in the very same fashion that it did when she was well. And that, I think, is the real tragedy. Her life was a search for meaning which was unfortunately exposed to the ravenous public eye through the lens of a frenzied media who exist only to respond to the demands of our voyeurism. We complain – but we buy the newspapers and magazines, we watch the evening news, we read those online articles.

As someone who believes in the hope that exists after death for all who search for it, I maintain that the pity with Jade is not how she dies in the public eye, but how she has lived in the public eye, and we are as culpable for this as she. If any of us were to live how we were created to, then we would be ready for death at any moment.

Celebrity, to a degree, is unavoidable. We seem to be determined as human beings to find something, anything to worship and adore. We are attracted to immense talent and high glamour. But we are too fixated on this question of whether or not Jade, an immensely valuable human being, is dying with dignity, and rather should look at  whether or not we are living with it. If the answer is no in whatever sense (whether that is in our view of others or our view of ourselves), then we need to set about addressing it, because then we too are destined for the same fate.

<Jade may you find peace.>