40 years ago this week The King passed away, Elvis died. It was 1977. It was August. It was devastating. I can remember my mother crying about it for days. It was not a good time.
You see, earlier that year, another love of my mother, my father had passed away. He was the same age as Elvis.
It amazed me that Mom seemed to be so much more upset about Elvis dying than she did about Daddy dying. I don’t think in hindsight that she was. Honestly, I think she did a lot of grieving about Daddy over Elvis. But I also think she was grieving her youth. Elvis was such a part of her youth and now he was gone.
Mom wasn’t the only one who grieved their youth that day. And forty years later they are still grieving. Shoot, there are people who weren’t even alive the day Elvis died that still grieve him. And he was a loss. I will admit that.
I was a fan of Elvis. I loved his movies. I would sit with Mom on a Saturday afternoon and watch the old movie channel and just go weak in the knees for Elvis. I liked his music, I recognize his music, even today. I think I was a fan, not a fanatic. After he died a whole lot of fans became fanatics. A lot of them today are still fanatics.
Several years ago I got a taste of my mother’s grief, first hand. One of my teen crushes, Michael Jackson, died. He was 50 years old. I was 50 years old. He too was considered to be a king. And he was gone way too soon. And he had so many fans grieve for him. It’s strange to me that he didn’t have the fanatics like Elvis did. You would have thought that he would have. But he was gone way too soon, like Elvis, like Daddy.
In hindsight youth is fleeting. When you’re twelve or thirteen you think you’ll never be sixteen. And time crawls a very slow crawl from sixteen to eighteen. And of course it seems that you’ll never get to be twenty-one. But boy oh boy, one minute you turn thirty and the next thing you know, you’re fifty. And you are watching your own children in their youth.
It doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye to your youth, even forty years later. RIP Elvis.
