The passing of two British icons, eerily connected by age and manner of death, reminds us of the fragility of those we’ve painted as fearless: David Bowie, shattering all presumptions on gender and sexuality with wonderful androgyny, and Alan Rickman, never afraid to play the villain and entering a formidable film industry with remarkable ease at such a late stage in his career. When vignettes like these characterise their existence, no wonder we thought they were superhuman. In a way, perhaps they are.

Nevertheless, the decisions of both Rickman and Bowie to keep their health difficulties confidential, while more than understandable, served to sustain their guise of invincibility until the moment news broke. Denial is the first stage of grief, but the finality that greeted the public when their deaths were confirmed, pretty much out of nowhere, was an unpleasant reality check: our heroes can’t live forever.

Yet the way that many have chosen to honour and commemorate their passing is a poignant illustration of our attachment to their guise, and our difficulty to accept their humanness. A memorial for Alan Rickman has been placed at platform 9 and 3/4 at King’s Cross station. For a significant proportion of the younger generations, myself included, the loss of Alan Rickman is the loss of our beloved Professor Severus Snape.

Of course, this is a legitimate and cathartic way of grieving. It reminds us not only that our heroes live on in their legacy, but also that their legacy lives on in ourselves. David Bowie might have transcended all earthly boundaries, but he also inspired the marginalised to thrive off difference, rather than subdue it. Alan Rickman rouses the collective nostalgia of a generation, but also evokes personal experiences and memories related to the series. Though the struggle of their loved ones is of course greater, as fans, the fragility of our heroes is perhaps more difficult to accept, because we do not experience their intimate reaction to the world we cast them into.

The death of another kind of celebrity, Peaches Geldoff, affected me more than I expected. I might not call her a hero, or someone I really aspired to be like, but as an angsty, pubescent fourteen-year-old reading teen magazines, I unashamedly admired her rebellious antics and ‘Blow Bubbles Not Bombs’ t-shirts. Watching her take down resident rent-a-mouth Katie Hopkins five years later on This Morning, I felt a sense of nostalgia and even pride that she was so articulate. When I heard of her death only a year later, it felt wrong. I had in some corner of my mind chosen to identify with part of her life narrative, and she had unfairly cut our connection short.

But my wistful mourning was coloured by an image of myself mapped onto her, not the woman herself. I realised that what I had considered and yearned for was not the individual, whose qualities, musings and everyday interactions I could not begin to know or understand, but rather what I thought I might take from her, and maybe use for myself.

We are all wrong about the celebrities we love. Well, not so much wrong, but we all choose to interpret their stories to fit ours. That’s why the swathes of personal anecdotes, stories and accounts of their lives are beautifully rich and diverse. The vilification faced by a few brave souls, who chose to point out Bowie’s involvement with under-aged girls following his death, demonstrates this point. “We’re incredulous when a person’s crimes don’t match our image of them,” Angelina Chapin from The Huffington Post remarked. She’s right. Our images of them are different to the reality.