“I SEE DEAD PEOPLE.”

A curious aspect of my husband’s job is dealing with dead people. Specifically, dead celebrities.

My husband, Sandy Kenyon, is a reporter at WABC-TV here in New York City. As the entertainment correspondent his job involves interviewing movie and TV stars, recording artists, and other celebrities and covers every aspect of the entertainment business. Pre-pandemic, you’d often find him standing on the red carpet at an awards ceremony or a movie premiere, microphone in hand, interviewing the likes of George Clooney, Scarlett Johansen, Mathew McConaughey, and Amy Adams, to name a few. He’s covered 33 Oscars ceremonies in the years since he first started covering them when he worked for CNN. He’s interviewed nearly every movie star in the Hollywood constellation, both living and deceased during the span of his career. He doesn’t hang out with Matt Damon, a fellow New Yorker, but Matt knows him.

I’ve gotten used to it, but it still tickles me whenever a celebrity greets Sandy by name. I’ll never forget the first time it happened, soon after we were married. That day, we were having breakfast at a posh hotel in Manhattan where we spotted Clint Eastwood, who waved and called, “Hey, Sandy!” Startled, I whispered, “You know Clint?” To which Sandy replied, nonchalant, “Yep. Nice guy.”

Sandy also covers the deaths of celebrities. “They tend to die in threes,” he once told me. Call it an urban myth, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence to support it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve observed a celebrity death is succeeded by two more, sometimes within a matter of days. Most recently, it was the deaths of Larry King, Cloris Leachman, and Cicely Tyson, all of whom passed within a single week (may they rest in peace). Whenever Sandy gets the call that a celebrity has died, he has to drop whatever he’s doing and race to the newsroom to write the obit and deliver it on camera. Countless meals have been interrupted and day trips have been cut short, most recently after the death of Regis Philbin. We were in Connecticut when Sandy got the news that Regis had died and had just left the restaurant where we’d eaten lunch. Fortunately, we got to finish our meals on that occasion. “Please don’t die over the weekend!” we’ve often said in learning of an elderly celebrity who was on his or her last leg. Each time I say it, I feel guilty thinking of the person who’s dying and their loved ones who will grieve for them when they’re gone. Still, I appreciate it when a celebrity death occurs on a weekday.

Little did I know when we were dating what I was in for when I married Sandy! There were things he didn’t know about me either, such as the crazy hours I keep as a writer. The way I see it, we’re even. He sometimes has to put up with the sound of me typing on the weekends while he’s relaxing. I have to put up with his absences on weekends after the Grim Reaper has visited someone on his beat.