Fallen Angel - Brittany Murphy Dead at 32

  I was spending a quiet Sunday at home, catching up on some work. It was a rare day when all of my kids were gone at friends' houses and my husband was at work himself. So I figured I would use the peace and quiet to get some work done to help alleviate some of next week's work load. It's looking busy and with Christmas, it will be a short work week. Then I get a text from my sister informing me that Brittany Murphy died of a heart attack this morning and that she was 32 years old.

   I am 32 years old.

   I instantly googled Brittany Murphy to see what I could find out. Not that I didn't believe my source, but you know how rumor mills can be! Unfortunately, the news was confirmed on several websites. And already, the speculation was pouring in. The first website I came onto had just barely posted the article and there were already 17 comments,most of them with sentiments such as "RIP Brittany", but many talking about how she died. Of course, many people instantly jumped to the conclusion that it was drug related. Then some mentioned how thin she had looked lately and wondered if it was due to an eating disorder, mentioning that a heart attack had killed Karen Carpenter after years of anorexia. While I will admit,I am pretty much siding with the eating disorder theory, based on a photo of Brittany at a movie premier earlier this month where she looked skeletal, I have to say, it's a little sad that when a celebrity dies, the first thing people say is, "I bet it was a drug overdose."

   Now, let me back up here a little and mention that I am not saying that 99% of celebrity deaths don't deserve this tag, as that is usually what it is when they are so young. As soon as I heard the news my mind instantly flashed back to the death of Heath Ledger. And I am usually pretty big on celebrity bashing. However, I find this so very sad. This is sad to me because for one, I thought Brittany was a fabulous actor. She had an amazing amount of charisma. The first movie I ever saw her in was "Clueless", where I personally thought she stole the show from Alicia Silverstone. I think the reason she was so fantastic in that movie was because I could really relate to her character. She was the gawky, geeky, so unsure of herself loser in high school. Unlike Tai, I never hit it big with the popular crowd and had a high school career changing makeover, but I still felt I could relate.

   Brittany was also very well known for a relationship she had with Ashton Kutcher (now married to Demi Moore). Kutcher and Murphy starred together in "Just Married",which I thought was a great movie. They had a very palpable chemistry, and I was more than a little shocked when their relationship ended.

   So movie accolades and name dropping aside, here is the main reason I find Brittany's death so very tragic. I imagine it will be weeks, if not months, before the actual cause of death is determined and released. And in the meantime, there will of course, be tribute after tribute, and a deluge of Brittany Murphy movies will hit the cable airwaves. But the thing that is so very sad is that young women everywhere will continue to starve themselves, or binge and purge, in order to be young and beautiful like this fascinating starlet. Whether or not Ms. Murphy actually was anorexic or not remains to be seen. It is altogther possible that she had an underlying medical condition that no one knew of. Regardless of any of the facts in her particular case, the fact remains that anorexia and bulimia are huge problems in this country.

   I am a thin girl. However, I am also a very short and petite framed girl, and after the age of 30, I really found myself having to work pretty hard at staying thin. Anyone who knows me well will attest to the fact that I am certainly not one to starve herself. But I was very often accused of being anorexic or bulimic when I was younger. This was very hurtful to me, because I never consciously tried to be a skinny mini when I was younger, it was just the way I was made. I remember when I was about 16, I was eating dinner with my boyfriend's family. His mother was a fantastic cook, and I ate a ton of food. I got up from the table to use the restroom, and while I was gone, his mother asked him, "She's not throwing up is she?" Now that I am older, my metabolism has caught up with me, and I have to work very hard to stay slim. And while I have never been anorexic or bulimic,I can see how very easy it would be for someone to fall into this destructive pattern.

   I will use the cliche' that young women are bombarded with images of thin and beautiful women all the time on TV, in magazines, etc. And no matter how hard Barbie, or Playtex, or whoever tries to introduce "Real size women" to the media, women in America will always have that little voice in their head that says,"Bigger is Not better." This is so sad, and so wrong. I personally think Brittany looked her best in Clueless. The most recent pictures of her, in which she is so startlingly thin, do not look attractive to me at all. However I realize that if she did indeed suffer from an eating disorder, then she also suffered from an identity disorder. One in which the image she saw when she looked in the mirror was not the same image people saw when they looked at her.

With her huge brown doe eyes, flirtatious yet innocent smile, Brittany was a force to be reckoned with. I am so sad to hear of her passing, and hope that if nothing else, her death will raise awareness of the tragic disorders known as anorexia and bulimia.