The sadness of that statement is with me as I type, and it’s been with me since I woke up on January 11th. For days, I couldn’t stop thinking about him, as though his life and now his death were a pair of beautiful, painful baubles I couldn’t stop inspecting. I tried the words in different patterns: “Bowie’s dead.” “Bowie: dead.” “Bowie. Is. Dead.” I wasted hours reading all the articles about him in my newsfeed and poring through Google image searches to find the photos that matched my ideas about who he was. It didn’t make any sense. How could a personage of that magnitude do something as ordinary and time-bound as dying? How was it possible that nobody had known he was so sick? And who was I to give a shit, really? He wasn’t my dad, he wasn’t my husband. But when I stepped outside to walk the dog the air felt different, as if it had lost a smell I had always taken for granted. I know that sounds melodramatic—and it is—but it’s also true. I thought about living on the same island as so many celebrities and why none of them resonated with me as much as the man who had just died.