A Tribute to Prince
Lindsay Caudill
I can’t believe it’s been two years.
It’s all still so vivid. We were sitting in the McDonald’s drive-thru, about to head back from our walk at lunch, and I opened up my Facebook app while we waited. I tapped my notifications. The top one was from one of my sweet, sweet friends. I opened it, assuming it was a birthday greeting. Instead, it was a tag to a TMZ article that a dead body was found at Prince’s Paisley Park estate and was rumored to be Prince.
I started messaging everyone, seeing if they’d heard anything. I texted my parents, asking them to turn on the news. My mother tried to reassure me. “It’s probably not Prince but someone he has working there,” she said. “Don’t get upset, Linz.”
Only a week before, Prince’s plane had to be emergency landed and it was revealed he had to be given Narcan, although at the time it was reported as the flu. We all took to Facebook then to talk about it, worrying about what had happened on the plane and his failing health. He had been frail in recent years. Had he been terminally ill and we hadn’t known? He was a painfully private person.
By the time I got back to the office, I’d read and seen enough on Facebook via various news sources to know that what I feared to be true, in fact, was. I sat down at my desk, stared blankly at my computer, grabbed my bag, and left. On my way out, I told our then-commander the news and he teared up because he, like I, had grown up on Prince’s music. I turned the radio on in the car and the Sirius’s “80’s on 8" station was already playing a tribute.
Prince was dead.
On my birthday.
He was just 57 years old.
