FAREWELL LONESOME TRAVELLER

Life on the Range has claimed one more casualty. He was young, handsome, and by all accounts promising. His name was Heathcliff Andrew Ledger. He was an actor by trade and Australian by birth. To most of us, it would seem he had the world at his feet. But like many in his condition, the weight of that world rested not beneath his feet, but squarely upon his shoulders.

In the minutes and hours that followed the first reports of his death, there was a lotta talk. People gossiping about what happened…was it suicide? An accident? Many were saddened (“He was only 28”), most shocked (“Drugs?”), and more than one muttered callous horseshit (“I hear Playgirl has a memorial spread in the works”). The story is already a media event…and will remain so until our insatiable need for squalid details can be powershifted into some other "hot" topic.

But we’ve still got a long way to go before that can be allowed to happen. We need to know a minute-by-minute account of his last few days on earth and the precise toxicity of his bloodstream. We need to see fans leaving flowers at his apartment door, his ex-girlfriend publicly weeping, and his daughter, dressed in black at daddy’s funeral. We need to hear testimony from friends and acquaintances about his collapsing mental state and his increasing substance-abuse problem. We need to see photos to document his decline, and re-hear carefully edited interview excerpts that sound at present like haunting cries for help. And we need to point the finger at somebody or something – his “heartless” ex-girlfriend, that “soulless” Hollywood machine, the “selfish” actor himself. There will be a scapegoat; someone must take the blame for this tragedy.

And what will remain at the end of this dark trail? Just a face...some flickering images...and one more name on a long, lonesome list.

I must admit that I don’t get to the picture shows very often, so I am unfamiliar with his work as an actor. But I am familiar with his struggle as a man. And the older I get, the more difficult it is to see anything noble in the “Nick Romano Legacy” of living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse. The cruel and bitter truth is that Ledger’s last lonely days are echoed throughout modern history…testament to nothing but the senselessness and meaninglessness of fame, fortune, and that most-coveted of designations - celebrity.

All of which is not to say that his life was meaningless. There is no way to measure the chasm his absence will affect in the lives of those who knew and loved him. If my hunch is true, he was a sick man well before he found fame. Like so many restless souls, he felt that celebrity would cure his ills. And when it didn’t, he looked elsewhere to find relief. His decisions will be debated and judged ceaselessly in the media. But it is unfair to judge a sick man simply because he prescribed to the wrong medication.

So here we are again, with another good-looking corpse to mourn, the remnants of a life lived fast, not fully. There is little left for us to do but ponder what could have been, what never will be, and respectfully bid farewell.

In one of his final roles, he portrayed one facet of Bob Dylan’s persona. As such, I found it fitting to crib a few lines from the Bard to sing this sad young man to sleep…

I don't like it in the wind,
I’ma go back home again,
but I can't go home thisaway.
Thisaway, lord lord lord,
and I can't go home thisaway.