When Charlie Watts died in August of 2021, I wrote: “This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come.” I didn’t know at the time that Damon Linker had written two years earlier about “The coming death of just about every rock legend.” 

But it’s not just musicians, is it? Consider some of our most famous film directors: 

• Woody Allen is 87
• Francis Ford Coppola is 83 
• Werner Herzog is 80 
• David Lynch is 77 
• George Lucas is 78 
• Terrence Malick is 79 
• George Miller is 78 
• Hayao Miyazaki is 82 
• Martin Scorsese is 80 
• Ridley Scott is 85 
• Steven Spielberg is 76 
• Wim Wenders is 77 

(Obviously, other distinguished names could be added to the list.) Interesting how closely their ages correlate with those of the great rock stars — though the rock stars became famous a decade or more earlier. Won’t be terribly long before we’re saying “There were giants on the earth in those days.”