It's so weird when a celebrity you love dies. Auden wrote of Yeats' death, "A few thousand will think of this day / As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual."
The first such day in my life: I'm 16. Nirvana's singer Kurt Cobain has died, and word is filtering in to my little school in Alabama. Kids are playing Nirvana on boomboxes, sitting in the grass on picnic blankets. This girl named Kate was crying.
I didn't feel like crying, but I still remember the day 30 years later.
The most recent: Today. A footballer I loved, Diogo Jota, died last night (alongside his brother). I found out in a text this morning from a friend who said, "I'm just devastated for his family." And I am. He'd been with his wife since they were teenagers. They had three little kids. Parents just lost two sons in the same moment.
But of course 155,000 people died today. Many of those people left behind kids; many were kids who left behind parents. And so my grief about Jota can't only be that; it must also be that I loved the way he opened up space without the ball, or the deft touch that led to a goal against Everton (his last, as it now happens). It must be that I loved his personality from whatever I gleaned of it in behind-the-scenes videos and so on.
I say, don't let anyone minimize your grief over these losses. You remember them thirty years later because they matter, because the people you lost mattered to you.
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