I am a child of 80s and though I was never a huge fan of Whitney Houston’s music necessarily, I have felt sincerely affected by her death. Her music was always around as I grew up. I remember driving in a car in southern Idaho with my mom when a radio DJ announced her song, “You Give Good Love,” and saying that this young girl was destined to be a big star. Then when my aunt and uncle (who were staying with us at the time) bought their first CD player, her second album, Whitney, was the first CD that they bought. It was one of those family CDs: everyone listened to it over and over (particularly in the beginning since it was only one we had!) so that we all memorized it, song by song.

I never really paid attention to her music after that (though a friend in college was a huge fan and had all of her albums), not until her 1998 album, My Love is Your Love, because I liked a couple of songs on it. I was living in southern China, the CD was everywhere in the blackmarket music stores, and a friend of mine from California and I would put on the CD and dance around my living room before we’d go out.

Hearing that she had died on Friday night, my first impulse was to text one of my best friends whom I've known since I was 19. It was an impulse to reach back into the past, to someone who I knew would appreciate our shared experience of music of a bygone era It was almost like someone I knew had died. She was always around, her music always in the background, her songs always punctuating odd moments. It’s pointless to say more since so much has been said and written on the topic in the last few days (amazing how fast things move nowadays, how something happening not even a week ago can feel like old news) but knowing that she has died has made me nostalgic and pensive and thinking that she won’t make any more music.

I think of her now in a similar way to Billie Holiday. She was a different kind of singer with a different kind of talent, but dying so young and after such a public decline will always make her a tragic figure in the end.