It occurs to me that I tend to start my pieces for this site with a personal anecdote. This isn’t universally true, but it’s pretty common. I can’t help wondering if that’s how I ended up writing so many obituaries for this site. There’s got to be a reason for it other than spare time and a morbid inclination. And yet, when Bowie and Rickman died last week, everyone just kind of took it for granted that the writing would be mine. Heck, because I’m on the West Coast and tend to sleep in, I may well have been the last person who writes for the site to even know that Alan Rickman died. Yet I still wrote the obituary.

Part of that, I suspect, is that we aren’t exactly an ordinary site. We don’t have any real reporters. Nobody’s getting paid. We don’t cover every celebrity death, just the ones that interest us in some way. And, I suppose, that’s where the morbid inclination bit comes in. I do dwell on death, which I could explain in part. I’m not sure anyone cares all that much except my therapist, though, and I don’t see her until four.

That said, absolutely everyone agreed that the site had to do something about David Bowie, despite the fact that we’re more involved in film and he was more involved in music. He did do plenty of movies, but that wasn’t completely why we wanted to talk about him. We just all agreed that we needed to talk about him, and there I was. And, okay, awake, because I’m on the West Coast and tend to stay up late.

Because we are not an ordinary site, on the other hand, what we want from an obituary is not the bare facts of a person’s life and death. The Solute exists not just because we love film but because of how we connected to it and to each other. We are people who want to talk about what matters to us. Any site could tell you that Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born in London on 21 February 1946. What we want from The Solute is to talk to us about the commonalities in the characters he played and to remember favourite roles and lines.

I’ve had deaths brought to my attention so I can write the piece. Heck, I started doing Celebrating the Living because it was so nice to talk about great talents before I was writing an obituary. So, I mean, why me? I think it’s because I do make it all personal. If not about the person I’m discussing than about me. If I am personal, it encourages the readers to be personal in the comments. And isn’t that how we started this site in the first place?