A Eulogy for Prince

Huh? Prince can’t die. Prince isn’t even human. Prince is ageless, immortal. Prince does not get the flu. Prince does not go to the doctor. Prince doesn’t do anything so ordinary and mundane and predictable as  death.

I’ve seen dozens of FB statuses like these. Like so many of my friends, when I heard the news that Prince had died, I was mostly shocked that Prince could die at all. Prince was already a ghost, drifting in and out of the public eye, dropping in at unexpected moments in his ageless perfection, an ethereal being squashed between two regular humans at a basketball game, or on Jimmy Kimmel, or The New Girl, looking delightfully strange and out of place and, yes, regal. There were few things as reliable as a Prince sighting for tearing through the fabric of the boring and mundane, for bringing a flash of pure joy to another day at work on the internet. We have the music, and the music is great. But I’ll miss seeing him. I liked the Prince-haunted world.

But Prince was real and human after all, and Prince died. Prince said when he was a boy he had epileptic seizures until an angel told him he wouldn’t be sick anymore. He was cured. And yet the angels couldn’t prevent this end. This extraordinary creature was as humble and vulnerable as I am.

For Andy Warhol’s eulogy, the art critic John Richardson revealed that Andy, the cool, detached voyeur who famously said he wanted to be a machine, had actually been a daily Mass-goer who volunteered regularly in a soup kitchen and treated the homeless with dignity and care and genuine feeling. He said Andy would never have wanted anyone to know. But sometimes we know people better in death.

“There’s maybe three Prince personas,” Prince guitarist Dez Dickerson said in an interview. “One of them is a very calculated marketing mind. That’s where the ’embodying pure sex’ thing comes from. Another of them is ‘I’m gonna be the baddest musician there ever was … and then there’s the guy who really is thoughtful and introspective and holds religious considerations close to his heart and ponders those questions sincerely and genuinely and deeply. And those are the three guys who, over the years, have vied for the microphone.”

When you die you can’t vie for the mic anymore, or choose your persona, or guard your secrets. You’re done image crafting. You’re no longer a superstar at the basketball game but another soul in the communion of saints. You’re no longer cool and elusive. You belong to everybody.

I’m sure there are people out there already obnoxiously insisting that a Jehovah’s Witness who wrote “Darling Nikki” can’t go to heaven, no matter how much money he gave away, and I sure do hope they’re wrong. There’s only one who knows the state of the soul and the contents of the heart, and he saw the guy in the silver wig ladling soup and the sick boy in Minneapolis talking to angels.

But I’ll say a rosary for Prince just in case. I must have one around here somewhere.