The Sometimes Daily Column, May 24, 2024
The Death Of A Celebrity And The Passage Of Time
This is the first column from Inspired By True Events. It is entitled ‘The Sometimes Daily Column.’
I will be writing these columns M-F, sometimes.
Observational, a discussion on current events and interviews.
A little funny. A little not.
-Adam Lutzi Rockwell
I just read that Morgan Spurlock died. He was the guy behind the hit documentary, “Super Size Me.” He knew how to use humor to get his point across. Hopefully, eating McDonald’s for a month straight didn’t lead to any adverse effects.
Whenever I read that a celebrity has passed over to The Happy Hunting Grounds (for vegans, The Victory Garden In The Back 40), I typically have two reactions:
1.) I can’t believe [this celebrity] died, they were so young!
2.) I didn’t know that [this celebrity] was still alive!
Then there’s always the Google Search Of Death: how old was the celebrity? They always look so much better and younger than everybody else.
I’m forty-nine. If a celebrity around my age dies, I start thinking about my cholesterol.
Last year my father died at 85. Good run for a longtime smoker and constant meat eater.
My father was a micro-celebrity. He was a cartoonist published throughout the world and everyone in town thought we were rich.
We were not rich.
Here is a link to his cartoons: thenorm.substack.com
After he passed to Valhalla, my mother asked me to write his obituary.
Fun times.
Not only did she ask me to write his obituary, she asked me to make the obituary a little funny. Not too funny. Just enough funny.
Talk about pressure, Ingrid Rockwell!
The first draft was too over-the-top, apparently, and by that I mean inappropriate.
Even though she asked me to make it funny!
I think it was the first-draft line, “He passed away after a brief illness that he had hoped would be a much longer illness.” I thought it was super funny. Just like she wanted.
It went back into revision.
Who can write the obituary of their father “a little funny” just after his death? That’s a difficult assignment for anybody.
I think what I ended up with was pretty good balance:
Norman “Norm” Keith Rockwell of Menomonie, Wisconsin, passed away on March 28, 2023, after a brief illness.
Norm was born in Webster City, Iowa, on December 14, 1937, to parents Frances and Norman Rockwell. Contrary to popular belief, Norm was not named after the famous artist, Norman Rockwell, but his father, the famous long-haul truck driver.
After he graduated from Mason City High School in Iowa in 1956, he moved to the metropolis of Waterloo, Iowa, where he became a shoe salesman. Not content with spending his days measuring feet, he left…
(yada, yada, more obituary stuff)1
I don’t know if I need to footnote that sucker, because I wrote it, but there it is.
The death of a celebrity confronts us with the age old reminder:
Oh, shit, if [that celebrity] can die, that means I am definitely going to die!
And then go get that colonoscopy I’ve been putting off.
When a celebrity passes away we are all reminded of our own mortality and that:
https://www.leadertelegram.com/obituaries/norman-rockwell/article_58baf938-d23a-11ed-b1e5-af6a6c5fb5d7.html
In Comedian Dick Gregory’s book “Cookin’ with Mother Nature, for folks who like to eat”, he had a lot of one-line jokes. As a vegetarian he wrote, “ I like to read the obituaries & read about the meat-eaters that checked-out.” He said that his family was so poor that the newspaper boy garnished his father’s wages.” Thanks for the humor.