Death has a habit of making the internet a game of guessing and the death of Catherine O’Hara served as a reminder that the pursuit of knowledge can often surpass the pursuit of sanity.
Ten days after the comedy icon passed away on Jan. 30 at the age of 71, the cause of death was listed as pulmonary embolism with rectal cancer as an underlying cause in her death certificate. The paper had also observed that she was cremated. The confirmation came to people after a predictable trend in modern times: the buzz of online sources, piece-meal information and the scramble to fill in the gaps.
Some of that instinct was transferred into the own, now-infamously comic candor of O’Hara. This was years after she had posted on the internet that her organs were in a mirror-image formation, a rare congenital disease (dextrocardia with situs inversus). During an interview, she remembered that she had heard about it on a visit to a doctor associated with tuberculosis tests on their child at their nursery school. “He calls us into his office and says, ‘You’re the first one I’ve met!’” she said, remembering how the medical terminology hit all at once: “Something cardi-inversa. And then dexter-cardia-and-something-inversa.” Her husband, production designer Bo Welch, cut through the moment with a joke: “No, her head’s on backwards.”
That anecdote has always been read as O’Hara at his zenith: the body acts contrary to what it should act; yet the punchline is nevertheless delivered.
On the days following her death that personal history had become the object as well of anxious interpretation. Dextrocardia and situs inversus may not be harmful to a great number of individuals, however, it may complicate treatment, particularly when the heart is affected. In the meantime, a pulmonary embolism is a clot which goes to the lungs and may easily lead to a life-threatening outcome as it blocks blood circulation and oxygen. A single clinical estimate summarizes the risk in very clear terms: approximately 1/3 of individuals with pulmonary embolism succumb to the disease prior to diagnosis and intervention. The clinical implication is not a lesson of the celebrity type but merely a simple reminder that there might be something under the carpet when one collapses.
Nevertheless, the larger wellbeing narrative on the death of O’Hara survived more in anatomy than in the emotional whiplash that happens in the aftermath of any celebrity death. People saw her as Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice, Kate McCallister in Home Alone, or Moira Rose in Schitts Creek roles that were effusively warm, theatrical, and a comic precision that made the viewers feel welcome in. Psychologists call that feeling of intimacy parasocial interaction, the one-sided relationship that the audience develops with media personalities with whom they have never had any physical contact.
Parasocial grief is likely to erupt whenever the grief of other people is on display, as well-tributes, cast memory, the language of loss, made personal. The tone of a relationship which started as fiction and grew to a stage to be hurt by was well defined by Macaulay Culkin in his farewell: “Mama. I thought we had time,” he wrote, adding, “I love you. I’ll see you later.”
The same plaintive cry also bumps into another contemporary threat; fake news that seems believable. Researchers have explained how the AI-generated death hoaxes of celebrities are rapidly increasing in scale and speed, confusing the very fundamental question of what is true or not. Within such a setting, an official form may become less of a clinical form and more of a cultural re-boot button- one which replaces speculation with specificity, and which allows grief to be about the individual rather than the speculation.
The contribution of O’Hara that never required explanation is the role that she made characters larger without making them empty, and the greatest trick of her was usually how sincere she was playing the moment.
