Why is it that we have such a hard time believing music stars are really dead?  Why did so many people claim to spot Elvis all over the country decades after his passing?  Is it because the circumstances of their deaths seem so unusual?  With heroes like Kurt Cobain, Elvis, and Tupac, the strain of life in the limelight seems so apparent in retrospect.  Were they really happy living the way they did?  Maybe men of means such as these, long on wealth and imagination both, could conspire to fake their own deaths, retreating after rewarding public careers into lives of quiet solitude. 

Maybe.  What’s more likely is that our musical idols life in the popular imagination simply far outstrips their actual lifespans.  In the public consciousness, rock stars are not mortal beings, but demigods.  They can never be killed so long as they continue to live on through their music.  Perhaps that’s why people think they see Tupac at the mall, for how can someone be out of sight when they’re hardly out of mind?