Jade Goody Passes Away

It has been reported that Jade Goody, 27, the British reality TV star, died of cervical cancer early today. At her side were her mother, her husband of one month, and a family friend — and apparently they each give different times for her death.

One of the things many people had been concerned about did not happen. There were no cameras rolling at the time of her death. That remained a private matter, experienced only by Goody and those three people, but, reports Sarah Lyall in the New York Times, "the British news media have been running daily updates on her condition for the past week."

I wrote about Goody's situation about a month ago. As it is with anyone you hear about who is terminally ill, you hope that, somehow, a miracle will happen and that person will suddenly get better. But the forecast then was that she had maybe two months left. As it turned out, she only had one.

It seems that one thing that medical science can do more efficiently than it ever has before is pinpoint how much time a terminally ill person has left.

Rest in peace, Jade.

To Die For

---

---

I've never been a fan of reality TV. I've known some people who never missed an episode of a single reality TV series. If two such programs happened to be on at the same time, they would watch one and record the other to watch at another time.

But Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times about what may turn out to be the most powerful reality episode of all.

Lyall describes a young English woman named Jade Goody, who is "[c]rude–talking, hard–drinking, overweight, barely educated, in debt, the child of drug addicts [who] appeared on the reality show 'Big Brother' in 2002 as a kind of token lowlife."

Goody is 27 now, according to Lyall, so she would have been 21 when that program began. But, in Lyall's words, there was something about Goody that "struck a chord" with the British public, and she became a "working-class Paris Hilton."

The story took a tragic turn last August when Jade, as she is informally known by her fans in England, learned she had cervical cancer. Recently, doctors told her the cancer had spread and there was nothing more they could do for her. And Jade has said that, since she has spent her adult life talking about her life on camera, she may well die in front of it as well.

Now, she's about to marry her long-time boyfriend, and it seems all of England will be watching. The situation has raised all kinds of ethical and moral questions. Some people think she should keep her death a personal, private matter. Others see it as a way to regain the only sense of control still available to her.

And, as Lyall points out, Goody is having a positive effect in one sense — more young women have become motivated to have regular tests to check for signs of cervical cancer. Doctors call it "the Jade Goody effect."