Live Fast, Die Young

Lorraine shares with us her trouble trying to break into the funeral director industry.

A eulogy for Knut - the most famous polar bear ever to have lived.

Finella tells Eulogy about her work at Great Ormond Street helping children with life-limiting illnesses.

'KNUT DEAD'. Words to strike dismay into the most cavernous of hearts. Yes, the baby polar bear hand-reared by Thomas Dorflein – whose (rather Norse) name acquired trademark status after 'Knutmania' swept throughout the world – is dead.

Looking back over the history of his four-year life, it is not surprising that this small white celebrity attracted the attention that he did. Footage of his early life with Thomas Dorflein was ideally suited to viral YouTube dissemination, and he was so photogenic that he made it to the cover of Vanity Fair. Dorflein himself was an ideal sidekick to the bear star and famously fond of singing Elvis hits to his charge. Dorflein's unexpected death of a heart attack shortly after the pair were separated only added to the story's appeal.

Indeed, the Knut Story attracted symbolic appropriation on a scale unseen since the days of the medieval bestiary. His polar-ness made him a zeitgeist for an eco-conscious age - in which capacity he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and with Leonardo di Caprio as well as appearing as the poster-boy for endangered species everywhere from on stamps to at conferences. The commercial boost he gave to his home in Berlin Zoo also made him something of a symbol of German patriotism – his unexpected death took place in front of an estimated 600 visitors (who reportedly cheered his death throes - mistaking them for an amusing trick).

But Knut's story could equally be taken as a parable of modern celebrity. He was said to have become depressed on first being separated from Dorflein, and to have become fixated on human laughter to the extent that he found it hard to interact with other bears and would cry when left alone in his cell. His premature death – now thought to have been caused by some kind of abnormality in the brain – seems simply in keeping with the inevitable fate of the modern media star.

Ridiculous as this might sound, the significance of so many of these phenomena is rather in what they represent to the public than what they mean in and of themselves. One reason Knut's death is so unsettling is that he had become a shorthand for those particular types of media stories that everyone loves, that everyone engages with. If you went to a news website and found yourself drawn into tales of domestic misery, humanitarian suffering and political hypocrisy, there would always be some story about Steiff's new jointed variation on the Knut teddy bear. Or, Haribo's pledge to donate ten cents to Berlin Zoo for every tub of raspberry-flavoured gummy bear 'Cuddly Knut' sweets sold. Or, plans to introduce Knut to a female polar bear. The variations were endless.

With his death, the main news has invaded the sideshow, and a story that was almost invariably positive (and frequently amusing) has become a tale of tragic inevitability. The representative of the soft news story has been overtaken by death; the symbol of environmental sensitivity has died... neither version sounds great, does it? It also seems likely that we – the media-consuming public – will have to accept some measure of responsibility, since Knut's premature death seems to have followed a slowly increasing psychological instability brought on by the oft-cited pressures of fame. That said, if (like some kind of ursine James Dean) Knut had intended to create an ever-enduring legend, his death was a masterstroke. Berlin Zoo are already planning a statue.