I logged onto Facebook Saturday night around 8 p.m. and the first few stories that came up in my news feed were RIP Whitney Houston posts. Afraid to actually investigate in the event that it was true I posted:
OMG! Someone please tell me this is a joke.
It was not a joke.
Sprinkled among the posts by friends reacting in varying levels of shock and devastation were the occasional posts berating the sad posters: “You didn’t know her. Why do you care?”
I cared. Not because I considered myself to be a card-carrying member of her fan club. The news to me was sad because she was a mother and a daughter and her fall from grace was so tragic. If you had asked me whether I was a Whitney Houston fan three days ago, I would have said sure, mostly because liking Whitney Houston is almost like watching the Cosby Show. You just do. Anything to the contrary and you risk permanent black-card revocation.
Sunday morning though, I started to tear up halfway through The Greatest Love of All as I drove to pick up my daughter from a sleepover. Then I started to full-on cry. I was like Florida Evans who had held it together all day, and now it was time to throw the punch bowl and shout: Damn, Damn, Damn!
I didn’t know her. So why was I a grown woman sobbing on the beltway over the death of a woman I had never met?
Sure a big part of it is celebrity worship. It becomes easy to deify people who seem increasingly omnipresent in our lives. If one of the biggest stars can fall so far from the sky, what hope is there for the rest of us, flickering so close to the ground?
But it is still more than that.
At five years old I remember my friend and I holding a brush and comb respectively, singing in the wooden vanity mirror of the playroom that my sister and I shared before my brother was born. We belted out The “Greatest Love of All” backed by the song playing on the record player, competing to see who could hold her notes the longest. My friend, winning the competition, said the trick was to quiver your bottom lip just like Whitney did when she held a long note. I tried doing that while singing for a long time after that. It didn’t work.
Two years later I danced in the same mirror, now in my baby brother’s room in the apartment we moved into after my parents separated. With my double-tiered skirt over top of leggings and my pre-relaxed, hot-combed hair looking afro-curly-straight I just knew I was Ms. Houston, and someday, I would Wanna Dance with Somebody.
I was ten years old as troops dispatched to Iraq and I first learned about the possibility and reality of war. Whitney’s Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl that year became the first time I remember a song giving me chills. I didn’t know the meaning of patriotism that day, but I felt it.
Her I’m Every Woman remake came out when I was in middle school. At 12, I was not any woman, let alone every woman, but I sang it, and believed that I could do it all.
By the time she was ready to Exhale in 1995, I thought I was too. In true, 10th-grade dramatic fashion, first loves and life in general just made me think I had a lot to breathe deeply about.
And then the music changed. The beats got complex. The music became as fast paced and erratic as Whitney’s behavior.
Gone were sweet love lyrics over simple melodies. The new songs told me I needed to be able to twerk it, to drop it low, to watch him while he checked up on it, and make it clap.
Sometimes I just wanted to dance with somebody, somebody who loved me.
I now realize that my sadness is rooted in more than being a fan, or even celebrity worship. The truth is that for me, and many of us, if childhood had a soundtrack, Whitney was the lead vocalist. Our hope in her false starts, our optimism in her turn-arounds, our motivation for wanting to see her come back, and our disappointment when she could do none of the above was born in part from the fact that those moments were immortalized and cemented in our minds by the songs that accompanied them and that if she could get it right and last forever, so could our own stories. For me, her voice helped tell the story of a little girl holding a hairbrush, singing The Greatest Love of All, trying to make her bottom lip quiver. And if she could keep singing, I could keep rewinding my soundtrack and have that moment back again.
But nothing lasts forever. That moment is gone. And so is Whitney Houston. And neither one of them are ever coming back.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
This post was originally published on the blog Making Love in the Microwave.