The Albuquerque Journal, the newspaper of record for New Mexico’s largest city, published an obituary Oct. 3—as they do probably every day. But this one was a bit different: The eulogized individual had, technically, never lived.
White, Walter, aka “Heisenberg,” 52, of Albuquerque, died Sunday after a long battle with lung cancer, and a gunshot wound. A co-founder of Gray Matter, White was a research chemist who taught high school chemistry, and later founded a meth manufacturing empire. He is survived by his wife, Skyler Lambert; son Walter “Flynn” Jr.; and daughter Holly. A private memorial was held by his family. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to a drug abuse prevention charity of your choice. He will be greatly missed.
Walter White, of course, is a completely fictional character—a creation of Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan and his stable of writers. Little in the obituary is, in the strictest sense, real.
Well, except for maybe that last line: He will be greatly missed.
When a fictional character dies, we sometimes grieve as if we knew them, and knew them well. Television seems to be particularly adept at making us feel the loss of critical characters. Sure, perhaps not many folks actually mourned for Walter White; viewers knew he had it coming. But die-hard Breaking Bad fans will miss his story. Even shows that go through characters like Kleenex (I’m looking at you, 24) can leave fans feeling bereft when a favorite goes. These characters—even if you know that their storylines are doomed somewhere along the line—become familiar. They add something to the energy of the story. And when they leave, they leave a vacuum.
But other characters are truly grieved over, as if they’d been our friends. When M*A*S*H’s Col. Blake was killed in a helicopter crash, viewers were in shock. When Edith Bunker on All in the Family died of a stroke, fans could’ve filled buckets with their tears.
I don’t cry often for fictional characters, but it happens. When I was 11 and reading C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle for the first time, I sobbed like crazy when those dwarves shot down all those galloping horses. And even if I haven’t shed actual tears for a television character lately, I too get attached. Watching Jin and Sun die holding hands in Lost was hard for my wife and I to watch. And last season, Downton Abbey took us through the wringer.
It may seem silly, to get so worked up over the death of people who never lived at all.
And yet, they did live, in a way—at least for those who heard their stories. The fact that we care what happens to these characters illustrates the power of story: We mourn more sincerely the passage of the Doctor from Doctor Who (even though a new Doctor is just a season away) than the many nameless, faceless real casualties we read about in the paper. It’s strange, but I think it’s true. And it’s just human nature. When we know people, we feel their loss more—even if they weren’t real people at all.
Have you ever grieved over a fictional character? If so, who?
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