One of my favorite all-time Seinfeld episodes was the one in which George is convinced he should leave a room as soon as he makes a good joke, lest he ruin it by trying to make another one. While anyone that has ever read any of my rambling, dysfunctional posts that seem to never end (or even really have a point) may assume I missed the key lesson of this episode, I have always taken that as one of my favorite mottos in life. Always ‘leave on a high note’.

If I thought that was important before, the last couple weeks have driven home that point more than I ever could have expected.

In a couple week span in which we have seen what seems like an unprecedented string of celebrity deaths that have gone from the unsurprising (an 86-year old, a 62-year old battling cancer) to the inexplicable (a former kung-fu master, one of those guys from infomercials) to the jaw-dropping (a 50-year old man-child, a 36-year old former quarterback), the thing that I have started to realize is that George was more ahead of his time than we even knew. How you go out may matter more than just about anything else.

The most tragic example of this is of course Steve McNair. A man who spent his celebrity life as well as anyone ever could may be from this point on remembered for how it ended. A former NFL MVP; a pillar of the Nashville community; someone who played through more injuries than the entire 2008 Broncos; a historically black college legend that broke ground for all small school players when he became a Heisman finalist (while making distracted white people wonder why someone named a state school after an acorn); the quarterback of a team one-yard from Super Bowl immortality. All could have been used to describe McNair a week ago.

Now, will anyone remember him as anything but ‘that former quarterback who was (apparently) killed by his 20-year old girlfriend in a murder-suicide, while his wife and kids waited at home for him’? I hope so. I hope that the bizarre circumstances of his death don’t overshadow all of the great things he did in his short 36 years on earth.

Contrast that with Michael Jackson. A man whose time in the spotlight could most charitably be described as ‘eccentric’ yet just today nearly 20,000 people (of nearly a million that applied for tickets) crammed into a basketball arena to say goodbye. Long forgotten are the accusations and disturbing evidence of what he might have done (or wanted to do) with innocent children only guilty of having parents wanting to bask in the reflected light of being near a superstar. Due to a death that was most shocking in its ordinariness, Jackson is now praised as an angel. 

I am not here to shred Jackson or spit on his grave. I enjoyed his music (I may be the only person that would admit to loving Man In The Mirror) and his lifestyle was certainly entertaining for me in a certain Borat-esque cringe-humor sort of way. Yet I always felt a little sorry for him and am still shocked that the vast, vast majority of the discussion of his life has focused on his music. A part of his life that really ended over a decade ago.

I just think it is unfair that years of good work can be seemingly wiped away by something essentially out of someone’s control. I can only hope that once the immediacy of these deaths pass we can take a more reasoned look back and recognize the contributions those now gone made to our lives.

I can’t be the only one that noticed David Carradine will forever be a punchline but is guilty of something less disturbing than what Jackson was widely believed just a couple weeks ago to have done.

I think I am comfortable speaking for all of the country (anyone that objects feel free to speak up) in that the last couple weeks have been a little jarring. Losing so many people that many of us felt we knew. Whether it was a woman whose poster adorned our walls which we….ahem….examined very closely, a guy’s whose music was some of the first we owned, a man who was literally one of the last people we saw every night, or someone that played quarterback and in the process showed millions of people that they could too; we have all lost someone in the last couple weeks. We are all in a collective state of shock. Every time I pull up MSNBC.com I half expect to see another headline that someone else is gone.

I just hope that when the fog lifts and we all move on, we focus on the life they lived and not the death they died.

Not everyone can always go out on top.