The death of actress Shannen Doherty hits Generation X hard

When actress Shannen Doherty first announced she had breast cancer, she didn’t pay much attention to it. Kate Drabinski admits she didn’t pay much attention to it. But that was before she got the disease herself.

“Then I started reading about her story, and it was so scary because we were the same age when we first had it,” said Drabinski, now 49. The Charles Village resident was a huge fan of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the wildly popular series that made Doherty a star as Minnesota native-turned-California-movie Brenda Walsh. Drabinski could always identify with Brenda, but when the actress died last weekend at age 53, the connection was steeped in the frightening truth of what cancer and aging mean and how the story can sometimes end.

“We both did what we were supposed to do, and we both made it through. And then she died,” said Drabinski, who was scheduled to have a bilateral mastectomy less than 24 hours after our conversation. “It’s extremely upsetting when they die. I never forget that I could die from it, like Shannen Doherty died from it. I see mortality right in front of me.”

It’s an uncomfortable truth. With “90210,” “Charmed” and “Heathers,” Doherty was an undeniable icon of Generation X. Her death was sad not only because, like the death of her “90210” friend Luke Perry in 2019, it gnaws at the fabric of our youth, but because it further reinforces the truth: If our famous contemporaries are getting cancer and suffering strokes and heart attacks, we can get cancer, too.

“The universal experience is realizing one’s own mortality,” Marc May, associate professor of electronic media and film at Towson University, wrote in an email. “Pop culture adds that certain icons are the equivalent of our friends. It feels like we have an intimacy with them.”

That intimacy is heightened when these icons visit us in our own homes on television each week. “Losing Shannen Doherty is like a whole generation that watched ‘90210’ and/or ‘Charmed’ losing a friend all at once,” he wrote. “A bigger box office star could have died, but Doherty is an even bigger deal.”

This is a big deal. I’ve always been a fan of Brenda Walsh, who, like me, was a Gemini who moved to a new school and had to adjust. (She was also the victim of the world’s coldest breakup when her hot boyfriend and best friend cheated on her while she was out of the country. I’ll never get over that.)

As a woman who understands that my worth is often determined by what others think of me, I was drawn to the actress because she was repeatedly written out of hit TV shows because she was supposedly difficult. Today we can look back and compare her potentially bad behavior to a media landscape that loved to put successful women down. She was also born about a week before me in 1971, and her genuine vulnerability about her past and her illness made her even more relatable.

“To see her body basically fighting her soul? I experienced that,” said Kathy Yost, 47, of Pasadena, a cancer survivor and a huge fan of “90210.” “I’m not sure what was going on on the other end, but I saw her lifting people up until the end. She was posting up until the day before she died.”

There is another reason why Doherty’s death is so personal to me. When my husband Scott died of a heart attack at 44, many of the condolences focused on his relatively young age. Nine years later, at 53, a heart attack or stroke no longer seems unusual to me. No one would ever say I was too young to die of a health-related illness.

Blaire Postman, 54, a comedian who lives in Little Italy, believes that Generation X’s typical state of oversaturation and surviving social and cultural upheaval at a young age has hampered us and made us believe we are immune to death. “I don’t think we noticed that we were getting older, for better or for worse. We were in denial,” she said. “We thought, ‘Nothing shocks me.'”

But now Postman’s husband is a colon cancer survivor. Although he is doing well now, “his diagnosis was a shock, even though we had gotten much older. We thought, ‘Oh, we have this totally youthful attitude and I don’t think these things are going to catch up with us.'”

When I lamented the death of Doherty – as well as the deaths of Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth, people that Generation X grew up with – a younger person suggested that our generation should be used to celebrity deaths, considering that Kurt Cobain died in the 1990s at 27 and River Phoenix at 23. But those icons died young for very specific reasons and lived lifestyles that are far removed from many of us. Heart attacks in your 50s, on the other hand, are far too common.

“We saw it the same way our parents say their idols die of drug overdoses, like John Belushi. But they seemed to be an exception. They had gone down a dark path,” Yost said. “We thought, ‘I guess I’m less likely to go to that club and do the substances they did.'”

Another thing that too many of us have in common with Doherty is the tragedy of the American health care system. Even she, a famous figure, missed a crucial appointment that could have led to an earlier diagnosis because she didn’t have health insurance at the time.

“That’s a lot of people’s story. She was on a hormone blocker that she was taking and then stopped taking, and then regretted not taking it. She blamed that for her relapse,” Drabinski said. “I took it and got it anyway. I want to tell her, ‘It’s not your fault.’ I wish I could tell her.”

When I spoke to Drabanski on the eve of her surgery, she said Doherty’s willingness to be public about her illness was inspiring. “She said it was OK to talk about cancer. She was like, ‘This is what it feels like to have radiation on your brain. This is what it feels like to have your head tied to a board.’ That helped anxious people like me feel better, and it’s so helpful because it encourages others to do the same.”