The last time I wrote something under the name R.I.P. was in March of last year. That story still has no settled “truth.” Maybe everyone already has some idea of what happened; what remains impossible is how to tell a version of the truth that people can actually accept. That seems harder, and far more complicated.
I was at dinner when a friend at the table, sounding almost disbelieving, repeated the news that CoCo Lee had died. None of us believed it at first. We even asked each other whether it was really the same CoCo Lee we all grew up knowing. Then everyone reached for their phones and started searching. I only believed it after adding one extra word to the search bar — “death” — and seeing a report from three minutes earlier appear in the results. For people around my age, she is one of those shared cultural markers. Her death leaves behind a particular kind of sadness.
I still have not shaken off the aftereffects of last year’s plane crash. Not because I experienced it myself, but because when I worked for an airline, “awe education” meant repeatedly watching footage and studying the patterns and symptoms of air disasters. That sense of dread never really left my mind. I am not sure whether the fear has crossed into something pathological, so I even forced myself to go back and read more crash reports and accident accounts. The whole idea of trying to desensitize myself on purpose simply did not work.
The full truth behind CoCo Lee’s suicide has not been made public. And frankly, I do not especially want her death turned into entertainment headlines, picked apart in endless discussion, with her background dragged out for public inspection. People seem to desperately want every tragic death to come with an unbearably tragic story behind it, as if only then does the loss properly match the feeling of “what a pity.” On the other hand, when someone widely seen as evil dies, people only seem satisfied after excavating every wrong thing that person ever did and putting it all on display again, as if that is what is needed to prove that the ending was deserved.
These deaths that appear unrelated to our own lives end up acquiring their own price tags. Worth grieving, or not worth grieving. But in the eyes of the living, every one of us will eventually become the next person who dies — and be measured, somehow, by the same standards of worth or unworthiness.
May the dead rest in peace. CoCo Lee. The victims of last year’s aviation disaster, whose truth still has not arrived. The 27 people who died on the Guizhou bus. And those who have been completely erased from the “correct collective memory.”