The celebrity in all of us...

People die.

They die all the time.

And, yet, every now and then, one of those people reminds us all of our mutual mortality.

My mother died when I was 29, my father when I was 43. I woke up to life all at once at 29, I never forgot again at 43. And I am still, at 57, mindful every day of those losses and of so many more, so many friends, so many family members, before and since.

And then…and then Paul Newman dies.

And, ah, come on, I should care?

Me, distant by so many years, by so many degrees of acquaintance.

And yet I care, I really do care.

Maybe because the milestones of Paul’s career meshed here and there with the admittedly lesser milestones of my own then-young life.

Cool Hand Luke, back in 1967 the talk of many a high-school classmate, even though I, cultural nerd that I was, did not then see the movie.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I’m still a kid myself, a college kid, packed in a car in 1968 at an Atlanta drive-in with half a dozen other college kids, not one girl between us, all of us dreaming that night of getting lucky, and all of us, every single one of us, destined to go home lonely.

A breath of years later and The Sting. If you saw it, as I did then, in the theater, that last scene caught you by surprise, by happy, happy surprise: our Paul getting away with movie murder, our Bob living to love again. Who could ask for more?

Try seeing The Sting now, now that Newman is dead, now that all he was in that movie — the contained confidence, the mustache, that small stick of a cigar in his mouth, the fedora slanted on his head, those blue eyes, those scintillatingly blue eyes, saying whatever you wanted them to say — now that all that is gone, so, so irrefutably gone. Try, just try, go ahead, just try, as I did tonight, not to watch Newman and to feel so human, so fragilely human and so utterly doomed.

Admit it.

As Newman aged, so did you. And me. Except, of course, that Newman never seemingly seemed to age.

Even when he played some old codger, as in Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls, he was still Paul, still somehow the Butch he’d been, let alone the Hud he’d been earlier, not to mention the coolest of Cool Hand Lukes. A guy who lived life the way I would wish to live life, the way many of us would wish to live life, at once embracing it, but still almost entirely suspicious of it, those blue eyes summarily icing whatever they viewed. Newman could no more die than Gable, or Valentino, than Tracy or Hepburn, than you, than me.

Except, of course, that he did.

The message, let’s face it, is that life is short. Chalk up 83 years, as Newman did, and count yourself lucky. Clock 49, as my mother did, and oh, well. We live the lives we live, as long as we live them. Nothing more, nothing less. And Newman’s life, at once so long and so short, reminds us, if reminding was necessary, that nothing is forever. Newman’s death sucks life from all of us, if only because he was one of us.