Second Draft

I’ll never forget the day Kobe Bryant died. I’ll never forget where I was. I’ll never forget how I felt. I was score keeping at a badminton tournament and I got a text that read “Kobe is dead.” The night before, LeBron James had just surpassed Kobe on the all-time list of most points scored by an NBA player. I thought the text meant that Kobe was dead in the sense that he was no longer part of the GOAT (greatest of all time) debate, so I thought nothing of it. I then started getting notifications from twitter of celebrities saying “oh god please don’t let this rumour be true.” Seconds later I came across a TMZ article saying that Kobe had died in a helicopter crash. I didn’t believe it, but deep down I felt like something was off. I’ve never seen news spread on social media as fast as that article spread that day. Everyone’s fears became a reality when Adrian Wojnarowski, senior reporter for ESPN and NBA insider confirmed that Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter Gianna had passed way in a tragic helicopter accident. I was overcome by a rush of emotions that I had trouble understanding. For the following week, I felt like something was missing in my life, but I couldn’t understand why. I’ve always been a Kobe fan, but obviously I never knew him personally. He retired from the NBA in 2016, so he isn’t playing anymore, which is why I couldn’t quite figure out why I felt like his death left what felt like a gaping hole in my life. For the following days I didn’t feel like talking to anyone about the whole situation because it genuinely hurt to think about. When somebody brought it up and I tried to shut down the conversation, I was asked “why do you care so much, it’s not like you knew him.” So I wondered. Why did I care? It didn’t make sense to me that I was so sad about the death of one of my favourite basketball players that I had never even met. I am not a person that is very in touch with my emotions. I don’t really feel sad about many things. I have yet to truly experience the death of a loved one so I had nothing to compare what I was feeling to. I then began to question whether or not it made sense for me to feel so terrible.

Kobe Bryant is the perfect example of a celebrity death that devastated the masses. He is without a doubt one of the best to ever play the sport of basketball, and his impact on the basketball community was almost immeasurable. Kobe Bryant was a true inspiration to many. He was considered a true student of the sport of basketball thanks to his undying dedication to mastering his craft. Kobe raised the bar and set an amazing example of what being a professional athlete should be. In this age of social media, people can follow the daily lives of their favorite celebrities, leading to a feeling of knowing them personally. David Kaplan, chief professional officer of the American Counseling Association explained it as if the celebrities we follow become like extended members of our families in an interview with Huffington Post. “We grow up with these people,” he said, and by keeping up with what they’re doing on a regular basis, we feel like we get to know them and “in a sense, they become a member of our family — especially the ones we really like.” Needless to say, this feeling of knowing them leads to very strong emotions when they pass away. In the same interview, Kaplan speculates that the death of a loved celebrity triggers such strong emotions because it “reminds us of our own mortality” because we view many of these celebrities as larger than life. The way people deal with these emotions varies from person to person. What was most surprising about the passing of Kobe was the fact that so many people who didn’t follow basketball felt hurt. I had a conversation with my teacher about this subject, and he mentioned he cried when he heard the news, even though he doesn’t watch basketball. This made me realize that Kobe’s influence reached much further than just the basketball community. If Kobe’s passing was enough to genuinely affect an English teacher in Montreal that doesn’t consider themselves a hardcore basketball fan, imagine how someone that grew up in LA watching and idolizing Kobe while he played for the Lakers must have felt.

In order to avoid being consumed by grief, one must be able to express their grief. Grief is something that most people experience at one moment or another, but very few understand. It is hard to truly understand grief because how it is experienced varies from person to person. Julia Samuel, author of “Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving,” works with grieving families and put it very well when she said “there is no right or wrong in grief; we need to accept whatever form it takes, both in ourselves and in others.” I think that this quote applies very well to the Kobe situation because of the extensive amounts of negative messages directed at people grieving publicly online. Many fans took to social media as an outlet for the expression of their grief. I came across countless messages implying that people had no reason to feel sad because they didn’t know Kobe personally. Some might choose to grieve alone, but many people seek a sense of community to get through their trauma, and many people find that online. Kaplan addressed this in the same interview for Huffington Post when he said that “we are social creatures, we are meant to be with other people when we face adversity.” Seeking a sense of community and expressing your grief can be incredibly important steps in someone’s grieving process, and when people challenge you online for grieving can be quite detrimental to that process.