Fans loved Oliver Tree for his catchy, alternative-pop music and signature bowl cut-style bangs. Now, they’re in shock and grieving after the 32-year-old was presumed dead Sunday, June 14 after a helicopter accident in Brazil.
Tree rose to fame with his 2021 hit “Life Goes On,” which garnered a fanbase on TikTok and marked his debut on the Billboard Top 100 chart. The potential loss is reminding listeners, especially Gen Z, of other unexpected, young celebrity deaths like Liam Payne and XXXTentacion − making the news hit even harder.
“It’s been six years of that bowl cut and those jeans, and he’s gone,” one TikTok user shared. “The same feeling I got when I read that headline, ‘[rapper XXXTentacion] shot and killed,’ is like the same feeling I’m getting when, ‘Oliver Tree dead in helicopter.’ Is that crazy to say that? That doesn’t feel great.”
“Same way I felt when Liam Payne died,” a commenter agreed.
Even if you never met the person, celebrity deaths can feel personal. And while grief is different for everyone, experts say collective or public grief is a valid experience and can be exacerbated when the death of a public figure is learned unexpectedly in the news or on social media.
“When people experience sudden loss, they may feel shocked, disbelief, confused, and even in denial,” Shavonne Moore-Lobban, a licensed psychologist, previously told USA TODAY. “The suddenness of the loss may be too much to process and feel too unreal for a person to immediately grasp.”
Many people also experience parasocial relationships with celebrities, a phenomenon frequently associated with fan culture, which can make a public figure’s death feel even more real.
“It’s a fascinating thing that people don’t realize we really can grieve people we didn’t know,” David Kessler, grief expert and founder of Grief.com, previously told USA TODAY. “And it doesn’t mean we’re going to grieve them like our spouse or mother, father, or sister or child, but we will grieve them.”
The deaths of public figures may also serve as opportunities to widen discussions on grief.
“We have a relationship with death that we don’t quite know how to explore as a society,” Kessler said. “I always tell people the death rate is 100%. So we know we’re all going to die someday, intellectually, but we don’t know, is death the great enemy? Is it the great comforter, when we’re in pain? We sort of don’t know how to hold it.”
Contributing: David Oliver, KiMi Robinson and Alyssa Goldberg, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oliver Tree’s death sparks collective grief for shocked Gen Z fans
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