David’s Bowie death shocked and saddened me. I really liked his music, not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. My mum, a French baby boomer, had bought ‘Ziggy Stardust’. I listened to the songs ‘Rock n’ Roll Suicide’, and ‘Five Years’, sometime in the late 1970s. I must have been about seven or eight years old at the time. I looked at Bowie’s image on the font cover with a great deal of fascination. I thought he was handsome. I remember asking my mum if she too found him beautiful. It was a burning question for me. My mum told me he was ‘too effeminate’ for her taste. Me, I continued to cherish his androgynous image, fascinated by his asymmetric eyes and what I thought was an air of cold cruelty and detachment. Because, as a child, and later as a young person, I was not moved by kindness. I was attracted to the dark side, to cruelty and bad boys, etc. In short, I was young. Kindness is for middle aged and old people, and I discovered it later, much later. So Bowie, to me, was a bad, beautiful man, who made wonderful music and had an extraordinary baritone voice. His voice never ceased to move me, and continued to accompany me when I became an awkward and somewhat plump teenager.

I remember the album ‘Let’s Dance’. My mum had not bought this one, it was probably too pop - ‘de la soupe’-, I am sure she would have said, but boy, how I remember it. And my favourite was ‘China Girl’. I listened to Bowie’s wonderful voice, and the erotic charge in it, the naked desire, the lust, and I fantasised about him. I was a teenager.

Bowie represented danger, forbidden things. I saw ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ - a great movie. I loved it. I was so enamoured with Bowie that I did not mind the homosexual storyline, when otherwise gay or lesbian movies do nothing much for me (I am really straight). But I made an exception for Bowie, and of course the peck on the cheek that sends the Japanese officer into a trance is hardy a full body encounter.

Forbidden things again, the soundtrack he made for ‘Cat People’ with Natassja Kinski and Andy MacDowell, the marvellous ‘Putting out Fire’. If you watch the film, you will see that it’s the story of a brother and sister who are reunited in their youth. They have the curse of the leopard, which means that they can only safely have sex with one another, as is suitable if you happen to be a leopard in disguise. It stands to reason that you can only fuck your own kind, but the female character does not see it that way, and rejects MacDowell. Then bad things happen. Although the ‘Putting out Fire’ song is wonderful, the video is a bit of a let down because MacDowell’s slip of the hips- supposedly to indicate his feline-like characteristics- is more comical than sinister.

I saw ‘Hunger’, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. And the association of Deneuve and Bowie was, shall we say, very powerful. Ah, the thrill of death and desire, Eros and Thanatos. So much better than ‘Interview with a Vampire’. I’d swap Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt for Bowie everyday.

So Bowie accompanied me in my childhood and teenage years, and part of my youth, too. I listened to him when I was a student in my twenties, with friends, boyfriends -mainly one- and later in my early thirties. I became a fan of ‘Heroes’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’. When a depressed mood took me, I listened to ‘Five Years’- it sure is a sad song, and was perfect for me. I knew I was not alone, then, and I could enjoy being sad. Sadness can be beautiful, and Bowie expressed it perfectly. I typed away at my PhD while crying listening to ‘Five Years’. For this I have to thank David Bowie.

I bought ‘Heathen’ when it came out in 2002 and I went through a brief Bowie revival phase, but it was not to last. Bowie’s creativity was not what it once had been, he was settled in New York, married to a super model, and I was moving into middle age. He could no longer be fascinating. I had became considerably mellower- like I said, I was letting go of my youth- so boring things like stability, kindness, etc, meant a lot to me. Hardly rock n’ roll.

Perhaps it’s fitting then, that Bowie’s last album was not rock and roll. Jazzy? I am not sure. But Bowie has come back, for the last time. And he certainly came back to me. Except that this time he made me think about death.

Bowie did not want to die. But he managed to take control of his death. He planned it meticulously. It’s almost as if he timed his disappearance to coincide with both the release of his album and his birthday. And I wish that when the time comes, I will be able to do the same: plan and take control of my death. Bowie raised once again fundamental questions. Is death to be feared? Can it be beautiful? Is it painful, or peaceful? What do we feel when we die? Is there an afterlife? Can we accelerate our own demise if we feel we don’t have much left to do, or if we simply want to go, because we can’t carry on with the business of living?

Bowie wanted ‘to go without a fuss’. He did not want any public ceremony. He was extremely modern, but in one thing at least he was not of this age: there was no sentimentalism about him. And that’s one of many things I like about Bowie. The writhing of the hands, the lachrymose competition - when people take selfies in places transformed into ad hoc memorials - I find this tremendously irritating, and finally obscene. I think it started with Diana’s death. At the time people cried, laid out flowers and candles, and it was one of the rare occasions when the monarchy was really vacillating, rescued by none other than Tony Blair (so we have to thank him for that, among many other things such as the Iraq war). Since then, public displays of grief have become commonplace. So we wipe our tears, have cracks in our voices and write moving tributes about dogs, celebrities - icons, we now call them -, victims of terrorist attacks, lions, child refugees, victims of strikes, kangaroos, etc. What do they have in common? Well, they’re dead. And if you don’t cry, you’re hard and uncaring. Bowie was the antithesis of this circus.

So Bowie, just like he helped me discover forbidden things in my childhood and my youth - sadness, alienation, and desire- helped me to reconnect with death in my middle age. I thank him for this.