Second Lives

Yogi Berra died recently. You may not know Yogi, but he was one of the New York Yankee baseball greats, and a part of my childhood as a result. When I was a boy baseball was the national sport in the U.S., so every male had a favorite team and player.  I played and watched baseball then. Yogi was a member of my favorite team, the New York Yankees. Why am I mentioning this? It's because Yogi's death made me think about people we know of, but never knew. It's the knew of versus knew juxtaposition.  Their lives often impact us more than some humans we have frequent contact with every day in person.  The "we know of" humans include celebrities we watched from afar and either admired or disliked.

Unlike we who live non public lives, I think that the people who have public lives are in a sense born twice, once when at the height of their fame and then at death after being forgotten by their admirers or haters but suddenly being confronted with at their death announcement. We actually continue to learn about those deceased public people, even things we didn't know when we followed their activities in their "first life".

For example, Yogi's obituary said he was one of the first soldiers to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944's D Day invasion. It also said he received numerous medals for bravery and a purple heart in the war. Yogi was born anew to me in reading that because at no time did I previously know of his war time experiences. But then, people in Yogi's generation were taught that bragging about heroism was not good. I can't imagine many of the  publicity seeking baseball players of today hiding their good deeds from us.

Whenever I read of the death of someone I knew of, often I knew of from my childhood, it makes me reintroduce myself to them and to their exploits. Their death makes me feel the same age I was when they were first publicly born, and I recall not only their lives but the lives of people I knew personally when they were at their celebrity. I even recall my own life experiences when the deceased's life experiences are recalled in the obituary.  It makes me seek more information about them and reflect and appreciate or dislike them even more than I did when they were alive. This is good, yet their death is not. Perhaps that's why when being alerted of their death, I feel a little guilty about not having appreciating them when  they lived their famous first lives.

I wonder if the deceased realized the impact their public lives had on those who watched their exploits. Perhaps they didn't care Anyway, sorry you are gone, Yogi. You were good to me for so long.