I’m always touched when I hear of families and friends celebrating the life as well as mourning the death of a loved one.

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Rock legend Bo Diddley died this week. He had suffered a stroke last spring and a heart attack last August. Both had taken their toll, and he was rehabilitating at his Florida home. Up until then he was still touring, in part for the love of music and in part for the money because he was paid a flat fee for many of his recordings and received no royalties payments on record sales, as with many artists of his generation.

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A private wake was held on Friday and a public funeral was held the following day. What I watched on Sunday morning wasn’t a wake or funeral though, it was The Diddley Memorial in the form of a concert, featuring the members of his touring band. As the man who’s influence was felt from Buddy Holly to the Rolling Stones and The Clash, it was an appropriate tribute and the one he’d want to have. Mourn the death, but continue to celebrate the life.

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Another public figure lost this week at the age of 86, was the sportscaster Jim McKay. To me, and I’m sure many of my generation, he represented sports. With his orange jacket he’d speak of “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” starting that well known show ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I watch the Olympics religiously just because of him, and he was the individual that broke the grim news of the deaths at the Munich Olympics.

“Some people … can make something dramatic by the inflections of their voices, without shouting,” Roone Arledge (tv exec. ABC) said. “Jim’s not just somebody yelling at you. He has a sense of words, a sense of the drama of the moment.”

Sportscaster Mike Tirico recalled that at his home when growing up in New York “dinner wasn’t served until ‘Wide World of Sports’ was over.” Tirico went on to work at four British Opens with McKay.

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What happens when death is not at the end of a rich life or not of natural causes? How hard to celebrate this life when it has been cut short. How do you mark the life when the death overshadows everything?

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Jane Hammond’s Fallen:

As long as American troops continue to be killed in Iraq, artist Jane Hammond will honor them in an open-ended installation. She spends two full days a week, with two assistants, still working on this piece. Begun in 2004, the year after the US invasion of Iraq, it now comprises more than 3,800 digital prints in the shapes of autumn leaves. She struggles to keep up with the official count of American war dead. Each autumn since beginning Fallen, Hammond collects leaves. Once selected for reproduction she painstakingly scans, maps and recreates the leaf front and back, including the unique shape of the leaf including scalloped edges, holes tears and other imperfections. Hand touches are made with gouache, acrylic, and sumi ink, then she writes the name of the soldier. With this process, each of the prints is a separate individual leaf; she makes no duplicates.

The idea came to her in a dream. In it she was walking through the woods where, as leaves dropped, she noticed that each carried a soldier’s name.

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Back in spring of 2005, a woman who had recently lost her son in Iraq overheard some people talking about the installation. Finding the Lelong Gallery, where it was first on view, the woman went and looking down, immediately spotted the small brown leaf that bore her son’s name. How improbable, since there were already more than 1,500 leaves in the pile. During the course of th installation, the woman would come and sit there every Friday. The piece had become a public acknowledgment of the deaths, absent to her during the Iraq conflict. Rarely does the public see the draped coffins and hear of the particulars of our military losses. The memorial continues to grow as the US occupation continues.