A little over a month ago, the world of professional wrestling and its fans suffered a sudden and shocking loss as they learned of the death of Windham Rotunda, more widely known by his ring name, Bray Wyatt.
As a professional wrestler, Wyatt was regarded amongst his peers as a true genius and once-in-a-lifetime talent. His character development and storytelling capabilities were just as impressive and captivating as his athleticism. As a person, Rotunda had a fiancé and two daughters, was a beloved brother and son, and was by all accounts generous, funny, caring, and had one of the best laughs anyone had ever heard.
We hear of untimely celebrity deaths with some amount of frequency in this age of instant internet knowledge. These deaths grab our attention in ways that it is sometimes hard to understand. After all, we didn’t have personal relationships with these people, but nonetheless their work, art, and contributions to the world may have had a meaningful impact on our lives. Perhaps we feel as though the loss comes from knowing there will never again be new work coming from them, and it is the art or performance itself that we grieve rather than the person behind it.
Most of the time with celebrity deaths there is a formula and a timeline to how they are processed by society at large. It goes something like this.
News breaks of their death. Maybe a family member makes an announcement, maybe the news gets out some other way, but however word gets out, it’s out. The next 12 hours become a whirlwind of journalists and bloggers and newsrooms racing to get their headlines out on every channel they have. Other than word beginning to spread, the world and industry continue, business as usual, albeit sometimes with an air of sadness.
The next 24 hours involve the public at large getting involved. A flood of activity begins: retweeting, hash-tagging #RIP, reflecting on this celebrity’s work and impact, somber “can you believe it....?” conversations with coworkers around water coolers. Privately, those who felt most deeply impacted by the artistry of this person may shed tears and deep dive into the works they left behind.
Within 48 hours any controversies around this person’s death - real or fabricated - have usually begun to circulate. They have become a punchline for at least one stand-up comic. The public has decided to abandon its role of sitting with the grief and sorrow and loss of a human life, their attention now focused on discovering how this person was different from them. I suspect this is likely to distance ourselves from the universal fact of our own fragile and tenuous mortality.
By the end of the week, the news cycle has usually moved on and the posts have stopped. Sometimes the celebrity’s work will come up - whether it be a song on the radio or a rerun of a TV show or a poster featuring their artwork - and people will feel a small pang of sorrow that they quickly move past, if they even notice it at all.
Of course, every death is different in its own subtle ways, and every person processes things in their own unique ways. But in broad strokes, that tends to be how I’ve seen celebrity deaths go.
But not so with Bray Wyatt.
Perhaps it is because professional wrestling, and particularly WWE - the brand for which he worked - has such a deeply passionate and loyal following. Perhaps it is because lifelong fans genuinely do feel like they get to know the people behind the characters as they watch the performer and storyline develop and grow. Perhaps it is because Bray Wyatt was a massive celebrity in the circles that know about wrestling, but completely unknown by non-wrestling fans. I can’t say exactly why, but his death not only felt different - it was handled differently as well.
For starters, news of his death completely disrupted the industry he was a part of, despite the fact that he was not actively working at the time of his death. From a strictly logistical standpoint, there was no need to change anything about the plans they had. But when the news broke on a Thursday, WWE made the powerful (and quite likely very expensive) decision to completely wipe the slate of their Friday Night Smackdown card. They changed the entire plan for the two-hour show to be a celebration of Bray Wyatt’s life and career, as well as honoring the legendary Terry Funk who had also died the day before Wyatt, at the age of 79. Logistically, this meant that flights had to be booked last minute for certain people to be able to be there, all of the stage manager’s directions and tech were scrapped, the crew’s pyro was completely reset, ring gear had to be redesigned and delivered, and every bit of advertising they’d put into promoting the show thus far made promises that would not be delivered to the fans tuning in that night.
But we didn’t care. In fact, we would have been pissed if they’d gone on, business as usual.
That night opened with a tribute package that was put together by WWE, a 10 bell salute honoring the two late performers as the entire roster stood onstage, and the entire audience sang a song deeply associated with Bray Wyatt’s character: “He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands.” As the audience sang, those closest to Wyatt on the stage nodded approvingly. Memorial bands were worn by most of the performers sporting “Bray” “Wyatt” “Windham” and “B.W. + T.F.” It didn’t matter if the performer’s character was supposed to be a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” Throughout the show, people spoke about the impact both Wyatt and Funk had on their careers. The final main event match was between one of Bray Wyatt’s most prolific rivals and his very last opponent before his death. The show was powerful, to say the very least.
But that wasn’t the end of the process. The world and the fans and the performers didn’t move on right away. Monday Night RAW rolled around 3 days later and the tribute package was played as another audience sang. More stories were shared by people wearing memorial armbands with his name about Wyatt’s impact and heart. NXT rolled around on Tuesday and the tribute package was played as a third audience sang and yet more stories were told.
In other wrestling brands like All Elite Wrestling, in many ways a direct competitor of the company Wyatt worked for, the performers and commentators paid their own tributes to honor the loss. In London at a soccer match between Arsenal and Fulham, they honored him by playing his theme song at their halftime. Even now, 6 weeks later, fans are still showing up to arenas with signs that pay tribute to Bray.
The thing that I find profound about all of this is that the fans of professional wrestling are doing something that most of our Western society does a piss poor job of: seeing, honoring, sitting with, and holding space for their own grief and that of the others around them. Each of us has our own unique reasons for loving wrestling the way we do, but those reasons find a way to unify us. They make us a community and give us a shared language. And barring the internet trolls and bots in the comments on social media, the community has been holding space for those closest to Wyatt who have been carrying on with their lives through the grief. And many of those who were closest to him are still literally and shamelessly wearing their grief on their sleeves, with Wyatt’s name printed somewhere on their person during their matches.
As I re-watch the video of that first Smackdown after Wyatt’s death, I can’t help but feel that there is something holy happening in that stadium. I can’t help but think of a room full of equally stunned disciples trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered hearts after watching their larger-than-life leader, with so much life ahead of him, breathe his last. I can’t help but wonder if maybe the reluctance to put the grief and loss behind us as a community is borne out of a stubborn insistence that Bray Wyatt’s death will not be the end of his story, but that his heart will continue on even if we have to carry it with us on posters and tattoos and memorial armbands. Perhaps we are manifesting a resurrection of his spirit that will move forward with us. And maybe the world outside of the wrestling community could learn a thing or two from us.