Princess Leia was our first girl movie heroine, and we made our moms braid brunette yarn so we'd have earmuff buns for Halloween. Carol Brady of “The Brady Bunch” was the ideal mother we probably didn’t have, because our moms had to work and left us latchkey kids home alone, with TV and processed food our only companions.
Carrie Fisher and Florence Henderson—and other icons of Generation X’s youth—are now gone, stolen by the cruel thief that is 2016. The year has left the generation born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s wallowing in memories and contemplating its own mortality.
“It’s a very melancholy time,” sighed Shelly Ransom, a 47-year-old speech-language pathologist in Darien, Connecticut. “This is really bringing back a lot of teen angsty feelings. These people are supposed to still be the voices of my generation. It’s sad to see these artists not there to be our voice.”
Or, as weary, 51-year-old Lawrence Feeney, a filmmaker from New Port Richey, Florida, put it: “You lose George Michael and Carrie Fisher in a three-day span, you feel like you’ve gotten a couple of daggers thrown at you.”
Throughout the year, office conversations, dinner party discussions and social media have exploded with incredulity, sadness and fear, as one ‘80s celebrity after another died, starting in January with David Bowie.
The feelings have been particularly acute for Gen X, whose members came of age when many of these cultural figures were popular.
