Heath Ledger

What can anyone say, and how can one even get it out, it chokes at you and you have to brush back the tears, the anger and rage, the stupefied dismay that someone with all the promise and brilliance of Mr. Ledger is somehow just gone. It smacks of unfairness, of a world gone mad and in it's own way is as earth shattering as the twin towers collapsing. 

It can't have really happened. He can't be dead. So many of my hopes were pinned to this young man's talent, his ability to inhabit the skins of others for us, to take us blithely and care-freely out of ourselves for some few hours in his medium of actor. 

There are few artists whom ever reach our souls, those few genuine talents whom give everything in order to grant us, their audiences, a powerful picture of some aspect of ourselves. They find the Everyman in their characters, and their gift is to allow us to see some part of our own foibles and triumphs in their personifications. I saw myself in Ennis Del Mar, perhaps expectedly; but also without warning in his Casanova; and that was Heath's gift to each of us. My heart was wrenched apart when Ennis clutched Jack's shirt in Brokeback Mountain, and his Casanova made me imagine even I, too, could be such a flight of fancy, elegance, sophistication and desire. 

The sharp pain I feel is uncharted, unexplainable. I didn't know this man, only his characters. I've no claim to my grief for him, really - yet his death, like only a few others, has made me feel the world has changed again, stepping too, too close to unfathomable darkness. A light has gone out too soon. A star imploded. The black hole of his wake is still devouring my hope and faith.