music, books, love and kindness

So I was cleaning my bookshelves tonight and as often happens (this is not a good thing if you're seriously trying to get things done) a title caught my eye and I pulled it off my shelf to read.

At the same time, I also remembered that this week (February 4th) is the anniversary of Karen Carpenter's death, which might be a weird thing to recall if hers wasn't the first celebrity passing that truly touched and saddened me.

After she died, so many magazines (both tabloids and ones like People) ran the most scandalously thin pictures of her they could find. It is true that the nature of Karen Carpenter's death raised a much-needed amount of awareness about anorexia, an awareness which also ended up ultimately saving lives and changing the way people, including medical experts, saw eating disorders.

I don't think, though, that good intentions were behind the tabloid photos released in the weeks following her death. I think they were meant to be shocking in a bad way and that unlike, say, Elvis Presley or John Lennon, the singer is first remembered for her disease and then for her beautiful voice.

The pictures I like to see of her are ones such as what follows below, where Karen is spending time with her godchildren. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to be a mother and have a family of her own.

According to close friends, Karen hoped she would someday have one. I like to think of an alternate universe where she fully recovered from her eating disorder, went on to find true love and happiness and today, like her friends and musical counterparts Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John, still records albums with that voice of hers.

from Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy L. Schmidt