In March 13, we learned of the death, the day before, of Dick Fosbury, the man who revolutionized the high jump by crossing the bar on his back. His death sparked a chorus of reactions, including “But… wasn’t he already dead?” “. It is the same emotion that aroused the recent deaths of Marcel Amont, Paco Rabanne or that of Marcel Zanini, author of the hit You want, you don’t want, ode to consent before its time.
It’s not that the general public dreamed of their untimely demise, but these personalities had become mythical enough to make it impossible to imagine them still alive. At the announcement of their death, it seems unthinkable to imagine that they were among us on this earth a few days earlier when our childhood is so far away.
This is how the last few years have taught us of the deaths of many people who we thought had already disappeared, from Ennio Morricone to Charles Aznavour, from Jerry Lewis to Michel Bouquet, via Desmond Tutu, Prince Philip or the Pope Benedict XVI.
How do we recognize them?
They always looked old, at least older than our parents. When a documentary about them aired two years ago on TV, several people had already googled their names on the Internet. Moreover, search engine queries report that many have been to see if they were already dead. on hearing of their disappearance, some typed their names into a search engine bar to see their faces since the last time they had been seen.
They marked their century, their time, their era, their sport. They had been accidentally buried at the end of their career. When their second death was announced, we were able to find their passage on TV in black and white in videos from the National Audiovisual Institute. They had already been paid a lot of tributes over the past twenty years. They had since retired from public life. The photo of them projected in full screen in the sequence “They left us this year” at the Césars was well over thirty years old.
When they died, we heard about who they were “gone to join” (his friend Sergio Leone for Ennio Morricone, Guy Bedos and Jean-Loup Dabadie for Claude Brasseur, Jacques Demy for Michel Legrand or René Goscinny for Albert Uderzo…). People thought of their loved ones who would have been devastated by the news if they too weren’t already dead. No one ever questions the cause of their death.
How we talk about them
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