Requiem for the Real Icons

The pop star made it a half-century before his collapse, full of uppers, downers and every drug in between. In the days following his demise, I avoided the news, not because I disliked him – I felt only indifference to his music, his life, his passing – but because every word praising the icon with the sequined glove felt like a word I would never hear delivered in praise of someone else.

Put another way, our world contains a finite amount of newsprint and ink, airtime and attention. Every moment spent exalting one human being – and that’s all any icon ever is, just one man – is a moment society will never be able to spend on anyone else.

A week into the Michael Jackson death watch, when I felt bereft of news, I developed a new routine, one I hope to keep alive long after the special editions of People magazine have vanished from the newsstands.

I began to read the obituaries. Not the ones about the rich, the famous and the powerful, the so-called best and brightest among us. Instead, I read about the people who demanded no headlines except what their families paid the newspaper to run, folks I never met and never will meet. I read about the dead whose stories never got told, the ones who never set records for album sales, who never earned records of platinum and who never amassed police records of alleged molestations.

“The mass of men,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Thoreau couldn’t have been more wrong. Of course, he also sat in solitude beside a pond for two years, so maybe his error in assessment should come as no surprise.

The irony from where I sit? Only that the icon, Jackson, was so much more desperate than so many I have read about in his wake. People like Dr. Ralph Fargotstein, who passed away in Scottsdale on July 22^nd at the age of 93.

All I know of the doctor is what I’ve read, a few hundred words that make me wish I had met him while he still drew breath. Fargotstein had a wife, Dottie, a woman he called missus for longer than Michael Jackson lived. He had five kids and multiple grandkids. He was a Navy man in World War II and in Korea, and he served as a pathologist in hospitals across America, including St. Luke’s, where he made the laboratory a model of science.

Fargotstein retired in 1988, but he hardly slowed down. The good doctor pursued passions like photography and playing the organ and even attended flight school. Those who knew him cited his morals, his ability to inspire and his amazing recipe for barbecue sauce.

Every word I read made me wonder about the lives he saved, made better, returned to health. And by every word I mean all 444 of them, or about what CNN expended on Michael Jackson every minute all July long.

Fargotstein’s obit was an epic compared to the paragraph devoted to the passing of Paige Ann (Porky) Bandy, who died at 64. Bandy battled two forms of cancer all year long, before passing not long before the Gloved One. Porky called Arizona home for 59 years, graduating from Benson High School and eventually making her way to the Valley. Among her callings: Cop dispatcher, waitress, tour director, mother of a daughter, and assistant teacher of Japanese flower arranging. Her true niche, though, was in numerology. It took her across the world, gave her the chance to do reading after reading for friends and clients, to spin out possible futures the way the 21^st century media spins out pasts.

To read about Porky, about her husband Carl and about her trip across Asia with her teacher, Lama Madi, was to want to congratulate her on a life well-lived. We could have talked numbers, or psychic gifts, or she could have told me about her two beloved grandchildren. The conversation, I am sure, would have been every bit as riveting as any tour of Neverland.

I could have listened to her for hours, in the same way as I could have listened to the violin playing of Ioana Dumitriu, 59, who died at 10 minutes before 4 in the morning on the 17^th of July. The grandmother’s death ended a violin career that began at age 7, in Communist Romania, and propelled the prodigy across the world to the Phoenix Symphony, where she played for nearly 30 years.

To imagine Ioana, this musician I’ve done nothing more than conjure from a few words, is to think of Beethoven’s last symphony, his Ninth, a piece Ioana loved, with its “Ode to Joy” and its thunderous, heart-propelling finale. It’s also to imagine the small details, the little facts that define a life: The taste of her baklava, beloved at symphony potlucks; the pitchy squawk of Noah, her African Grey parrot; and the pride she must have imbued in her three children and her husband, Dan, himself a symphony violist.

These obituaries are only stories, husks of words in comparison to the people who lived the lives they describe, but somehow they feel more real to me than the hype surrounding the vanquished pop star. We’ve spent a million words on him by now, created a gray noise that has swallowed so many lives better lived. Saying so seemed worth one story among the many, just like all these lives I’ve read about seem so worthy of one simple round of applause.