Musings on the death of movie legend Liz Taylor

I couldn't help muse on the life of movie legend Elizabeth Taylor who died of congestive heart failure last Wednesday. The story about her burial said that the funeral service, although held without much fanfare, was delayed by 15 minutes in observance of her parting wish that her funeral must start late. It was said that before she died she requested that someone would announce that even in her own funeral she wanted to be late.
I hadn't followed the life of Liz Taylor even at the height of her carrier but I surmise that it could have been her trademark to be late in her film shootings or any other endeavors and that even in death she wanted to be remembered for that. If my assumption is correct, I could conclude that she wanted to leave a legacy for people to remember her by. It seems to be a universal wish among us that we should be remembered even after we had left this world.
It is part of human nature to seek self-importance, a subconscious trait tied to our pride. It was this pride that made the Beatles boast during their Manila tour at the height of their career that they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Such a claim, whether coming from the Beatles or anyone of us, has no purpose at all. It only betrays human insecurity.
Whether we admit it or not, we are driven by our sense of insecurity to seek some achievements. It is because there is some unknown void in our hearts that we wanted to fill, a void that drives the thinkers among us to find meaning in our lives, a void that we can never fill because, to borrow the title of a Lady Gaga song, we are born this way - imperfect, besides being mortal.
Taylor' stardom did not fill that void in her being. An Associated Press story about her death said that in her lifetime she married eight times to seven men and had acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and pain killers and was treated for alcohol and drug abuse. This is the same story replicated in the lives of movie star Lindsay Lohan, singer Whitney Houston and many other celebrities who went into drug abuse.
Neither wealth, fame nor power can fill this void. We will always feel the need to look for something more sublime, a feeling of inadequacy that drives many of us to embrace religion despite the advances of science because science itself has no adequate answers to the mysteries of life.
I don't know the spiritual side of Taylor's life but the AP story said that her *roughly one hour (funeral) service began with poetry readings by actor Colin Farrell and Taylor's family and included a trumpet performance of Amazing Grace", a popular Christian song written and composed by John Newton, who embraced the Faith after long years of living without "religious convictions" as a slave trader in the 18th century.