I play the vulture

I opened up the Huffington Post this morning to find an article on the prescriptions found in Brittany Murphy's bedroom. Her glossy pout was right there like a half-sipped drink and I couldn't click fast enough, it was all too inviting.

Polypharmacy! Possible drug interactions! There were a good eight or ten drugs listed and I called my fellow nursing student/bff, voice high and gossipy with the thrill of a new case study.

"Hey it's me and I found a list of Brittany Murphy's prescriptions online and I want you to call me so we can figure out what happened okay bye, love you." It sounded ridiculously cocky, given the list of things we don't know about her and given the fact that we are baby, infantile, nursing students. It is ridiculously cocky. Still.

I made my routine peanut butter and banana morning sandwich and sat down, the dregs of my green tea handily cutting the stick of peanut butter in my throat, with Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses. This is what we do, we nursing students. We get case studies and it is our job to sniff out all the crazy and the hope from a list of medical data, history and subjective reporting. My sister, who is a therapist, once called me during her years of interning to speak jubilantly of a new patient. Such a fascinating history of trauma! So many interacting stress and identity factors! What a privilege to participate in this rich kaleidoscope of a human. That's pretty much how I feel. It is delicious, this power to discover pattern in the most important aspects of human life and then to deliver some hope of wellness.

And so I vulture myself over the body of Brittany Murphy. I blink a little under the imagined stare of her heartbroken lover, father, friends. I tell myself, though, that if she knew, she would be glad to make me a better nurse; to help me save a life or prevent a death by trying to understand what happened to her. I don't actually buy this explanation because the truth is I eat up her details like candy; they're too tasty for me to hang them in dignity. Still, the cover of noble purpose blunts my guilt a little.

People always ask why we care more about celebrities. I thought about that this morning. Was it the caramel apple lips? The heavy bedroom eyes and the well-blonded coiffe, the money, all that airbrushing that makes my ego insatiable?

I don't think so. I think we actually care this much about everybody. Celebrities, though, they let us look. There is no one whose story does not engross me when told honestly. We're beautiful, aren't we? All of us. We try and we complicate and fail and then redeem, and we love to hear one another's secrets. If I die tomorrow, though, no one will tell you what drugs I was taking. You will not learn the sordid past of the people who love me. What makes celebrities unique is that they allow us to feel that we are close, that we know them intimately already, and so their losses feel like our own and their beauty might just say something about who we are. This is the lie we pay them for.

Good night, Brittany Murphy. I hope that people more qualified than me find out what happened to you, and I'm sorry that you were hurting. I hope that you had joy.