What We Mourn When We Mourn a Celebrity

Like many, I grew up listening to the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer.

He was one of my father's favorites. While they never met, they shared a history: Lehrer was a camper and then a counselor at the summer camp my dad attended (Stephen Sondheim even had him as a counselor), and they both attended the same high school, albeit fifteen years apart.

Lehrer was a child prodigy. At fifteen, he applied to Harvard with a poem and was admitted; he graduated summa cum laude at eighteen. On the weekends we spent with our father, we'd always end up in "the green room" to listen to his albums, singing along and knowing he was funny, even if we didn't always understand what he meant. Our dad loved it when we sang along, and we loved making him laugh.

Over time, Tom Lehrer became a concrete way to bond with our father—whom we saw only four to six days out of every month. Through Lehrer, we learned that laughter can be a form of intimacy, and that wit always won the day. Even when we weren't with our father, Lehrer's music was a way to be with him.

When I was in high school, Malcolm-Jamal Warner entered my life as Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show. We were close in age, and while many of my friends were obsessed with the stunning Lisa Bonet, I watched Theo, whose mistakes and learning challenges resonated with me. Though we were of different genders, races, and lived in families that couldn't have been more different—his sitcom-stable, mine crowded and chaotic—I felt a kinship. He modeled a version of adolescence that seemed whole, survivable.

On July 20, 2025, Warner drowned while on a family vacation in Costa Rica. He was only 54 years old. Six days later, Tom Lehrer died at ninety-seven. Two very different men, linked only by the fact that both had been players in the shape of my youth.

I never met either of them. Neither knew I existed. And yet I felt genuine sorrow when they died.

Why do we mourn celebrities—people we never knew?

Part of it is that they become stable links to better moments, to imagined worlds that offered refuge when our real lives felt unsteady. But it's also about space.

Celebrities enlarge the room we feel we have in the world. Through them, we discover humor we didn't know we were capable of, families we could imagine ourselves into, selves we might still become. Their existence feels like an extension of our own—our small footprint widening to take up more space with their every step. Their big life makes our own feel bigger; their genius or charm feels like a satellite of our more ordinary selves.

And then, they die. And with them, that expansion collapses.

Suddenly, we're back to being only ourselves. The part of us that felt cleverer, braver, more alive when they sang or acted has been abruptly removed, and we're left face-to-face with our unembellished reality.

(CW: Bill Cosby appears in some of these clips)

In the end, mourning a celebrity is more about us than about them. Their deaths mark the loss of companions who helped us carve out more space in the world—space for humor, for kinship, for a sense of safety we might otherwise never have found. When they go, we grieve not only the artist, but the part of ourselves that was possible because of them. And the world, once stretched by their presence, feels just a little smaller.

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Years ago Tom Lehrer released all his music into the public domain, recognizing the shared life between performer and audience, and offering to fill it.

Below, find my favorite Tom Lehrer songs of all time.

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