I am sad Amy Winehouse is dead.

I said this to a coworker on Monday morning. He said, “People die of addiction every day, why should her death be any sadder than anyone else’s.” He responded quickly, as if he had thought about it. Throughout the week I have heard bits and pieces of conversation. “I could have called that one.” “It was only a matter of time.” “She was too far gone.” I seemed to be the only person I knew who was surprised or felt a loss, if not personally than as a slight shift in the universe.

I was not a particularly devoted fan. I knew and liked her music but no more than I know other fresh and interesting artists. I followed her exploits only casually at the nail salon, but I don’t get pedicures very often, so the narrative was sketchy. Yet, I feel protective of her. I resist shaking my head like the others, piously noting the inevitable result of excess and a bad boyfriend.

Sometimes we are attracted to people we aspire to be, heroes who embody our highest values. I have a long list, typically either already dead or not real. I was the child who wanted to be Florence Nightingale or Seymour Glass or George Washington Carver when I grew up. Secretly I have second list. A list of people I would be if I were not the protagonist. They are the doppelgangers, the tough kids, the bad children who don’t obey their parents. Amy’s whole demeanor defied convention, a five-foot-three walking, singing middle finger. She was nothing like me, the grown up good girl.   

Before my own handlers convinced me to cut and color my hair, I would pile the mass of grey streaked black curls on my head and assemble a cascading hive with barrettes and clips. I tilted my head back and slit my eyes seductively and sang Rehab to the mirror in the bathroom. See, I said. I can look just like Amy Winehouse. I would move around the house languidly, ignoring the heckling audience, as if I were impossibly thin and covered in tattoos. She seemed scrappy, simple, and for all the make-up and coif, authentic. Everything about her was too big or too small – huge green eyes, nose, teeth on a tiny, angular body – the mismatch was not quite beautiful but riveting. And her voice carried echoes from all the wrong sides of all the tracks and all the women ever been done wrong. It was smooth, raw, epic, vulnerable. I cheered when she won her Grammy’s. I watched her videos as they were released. I could sing along to several of her songs.

Everyone knew she had a terrible drug habit. This was reinforced repeatedly by the incoherent sound bites and embarrassing photographs. I didn’t read the details. I didn’t click when my home page told me she was booed off the stage on her last European Tour. I walked away when someone tried to show me her addled YouTube clips. I could separate the troubles from the music. That is the whole point of the second list. I kept my illusion of the crazy talented dangerous woman who only looked a mess; a mysterious facade hiding a reality spinning out of control.  

So I didn’t see it coming. Because she was real but not really, just a caricature I thought was cool. I hear the buzz reduce her to a doomed one-dimensional addict. I was reductive as well, seeing exactly what her image makers wanted me to see. Behind both was a flesh and blood person probably not sure which version of herself to believe.

Of course my coworker is right, this kind of loss is always tragic, famous or not. But in the glossy pages of celebrities we deem special, I found Amy Winehouse more daring than the starlet on page 73. I liked her music. I liked her eye liner. I liked her attitude. Her voice seemed to say she could face down anything. But in the end that was just what I heard, filtered through my own longing. Her voice couldn’t save her. Now she is gone. A flicker, a reflection, a brief appearance played out mostly in our imagination.