Death of a flower, Amy Winehouse

I claim no special fondness or understanding for Winehouse’s music even though she was one of the most talented and adulated stars on the firmament. The best I know of her work is the lyrics of ‘Rehab’, a song that goes, “They tried to send me to rehab, I said, “No, No, No!” I also know that she battled a lifelong, well chronicled addiction to alcohol and drugs. That she also fought eating disorders and fell victim to embarrassing photographs (a tear stained face here, a ripped dress there). But the best I know is her dramatic black eyeliner and her beehive hairdo. And that she was young, very young.

Within minutes of that first text, I was scanning news channels and surfing the Internet for details on Winehouse’s demise. Even as I write, almost 22 hours later, there is no official word on the cause of her death.

Within a few hours of the death, Winehouse’s official web page went dead. The page which had links to her audiography, life and pictures stalled at just the homepage which bore a striking black and white picture of the singer. I guess you don’t know how to write a neat epitaph for one so young. You need time to process the enormity of it, time to understand the futility of it all.

Even earlier than that, Winehouse’s Wikipedia entry had been amended to the past tense. From ‘is” to “was”. That simple juggle of words that means the end.

In the hours after that, Winehouse’s most popular song “Back to black” had been shared more than 900,000 times on Facebook while the numbers of her followers had grown to 2.6 million. Winehouse is more riveting in death than she had been in her burnished but blistered life.

The singer’s mother, I learn had been fearful that her daughter was on the highway to destruction. And that she had asked Winehouse where she would want to be buried. She’d said in an interview that the inevitability of an early death is something she has made peace with given her daughter’s willful, wild ways.

There were others who thought the same. There is a website by the name of whenwillamywineshousedie.com. It’s a distasteful page that asks you to predict the date of Winehoue’s demise and promises an IPod if you get it right. That, and a chance to be crowned Mr or Mrs Death.

“Amy is on her way out and as the world is profiting from this decline we thought it only fair that you should profit from it too”, it explains. The “pre-condolences” section on the site runs into 9576 pages, dozens of which have sprung up in the hours since her death. One of the entries reads: “You kind of deserved it”. I wonder what one does to deserve death. And how does the world sit judgment on that merit.

On Sunday, a friend’s updated Facebook status read, “Amy Winehouse: so talented. so self destructive. R.I.P :(“. A comment to this follows: “People dream of visiting London, she had even her (sic.) own apartment in London and even then she was not happy with her life..” I despair and marvel at the logic of that equation of worldly wealth with happiness.

I wonder if Winehouse had ever seen the site powered solely by guesses on the length of her drug fuelled life. What would she have thought of her death being reduced to an IPod touch? I wonder if anyone claimed the prize. I wonder at the price of stardom. As I do on whether anyone in the Winehouse entourage had the courage to tell her bluntly, sharply that she was undoing herself bit by bit.

I’ve read somewhere that those who live off celebrities do all in their power to perpetuate the myth of that celebrity. That they will sponge off till there is nothing left to glean.

Death is stunning. When it comes to the young it is even more bewildering. News of Winehouse’s death ran at the same time as details of a mad shooting at a youth camp in Norway that left more than 80 dead were emerging. In both cases the dead were young, full of countless promises and sparkling hope. The Norway deaths were sickening. The Winehouse tragedy, recognisable.

In both cases, there will always be the distressing question of what might have been. And the certainty of enormous waste, of senseless dissipation and of absolute ravage.

For Winehouse perhaps no commemoration will read better than lines from “Flower Grown Wild”, a song Bryan Adams had penned for her. “Just another little pretty thing, Another angel with a broken wing, Who fell to earth 'neath the Hollywood hills, Amid the stars and the bars, the pimps and pills…”, it goes.