On July 28, 2026, Glen Hansard left a pub and hopped onto his motorcycle. He’d spent the evening playing music and drinking, a night one has to assume is typical for one of the world’s great Irish folk artists, and the guy who inspired Guy in John Carney’s film Once (2007). In the decades since winning an Oscar for “Falling Slowly,” a song from that movie, he’d lived his lovelorn busker character’s dream: risen up from Dublin’s Grafton Street to musical fame, touring the world with his bands The Frames and The Swell Season. He’d fallen in love with his musical collaborator, Markéta Irglová, fallen out of love, then later gotten married to someone else. He’d had a child, a little boy who, as of July 28, was three years old, still too young to really understand that his father would not be coming home. Hansard got on that motorcycle, drove a few kilometers, and crashed, dying at 56 years old.
I found out about this the next day, when my friend Sadie Pohl, SY ’26, texted a screenshot of an Instagram post to a group chat. Last year, we’d all done a production of the stage musical Once. We’d spent ten months with our ears glued to Hansard and Irglová’s music. It had been Sadie’s favorite musical since she was eleven, Irglová’s role her dream. We’d talked about them all year, too, so often they’d become less like celebrities and more like friends. We all texted out our grief for a bit, and Pohl and I called and talked it through. For a few days, whenever I thought about Once, my heart felt hollow, my breath short. Writing this now, I still feel it.
Hansard had that effect, it seems. In the weeks following his death, Dubliners, buskers, and folk fans everywhere grieved. His memorial was full of music and famous friends, from Bono and Hozier to Eddie Vedder and Irglova. Love has poured in from every corner of the folk-loving world, from Hanif Abdurraqib in The New Yorker to Hansard’s loving family to randos across the internet. “To me, he was the greatest live performer to do it,” writes one Reddit user. Another writes, “there are people, celebrity or not, that just touch you more inside than others, and their passing affects us more. . . . Glen was one of those people for me.” Abdurraqib writes, “What I loved about seeing Glen Hansard live was that he, spiritually, never stopped being the guy playing on a rainy street, trying to capture the attention of people walking by.”
But, of course, other internet randos have spent the wake of his death dwelling on the rest of his life. He met Irglová when her parents hosted a music festival in the Czech Republic and he stayed in their home. She was thirteen at the time, and he was thirty-one. Some time later, Hansard was invited back, as a friend of Irglová’s father, to stay for a few months and write music. Six years after their first meeting, he got the gig to act in Once, and Irglová got the gig to play his opposite; on the promotional tour, they began a real-life romance. Under a post in the subReddit “r/WhyWereWeOkWithThis,” commentary abounds, from the self-pitying—“ugh. I didn’t know this and now I can’t think of Once fondly,” writes one person—to the accusatory—“It’s an open secret here in Ireland that this wasn’t the last time his behaviour toward girls and young women was inappropriate,” writes another—to the globalizing—“So thrilled that every fucking day a precious memory is ruined by a fucking man.”
It’s a circumstance as old as the concept of celebrity itself: adoration and idolization all collapse in a day when news breaks of someone’s death and everyone begins to comb through their lives. If I were to form a support group—Parasocial Grievers of Complicated Male Celebrities Anonymous, if you will—it’d have a larger population than most countries. From Michael Jackson to John Lennon, Mark Salling to Glen Hansard, Kobe to Gandhi, talented and famous men wield power against the young people in their lives, of the same age as most of those who idolize them. When they die, and this comes to light, their fame tarnishes quickly. Media splits on how to cover their deaths, caught between wanting the juiciest story and respecting the dead. Fans feel that split in their hearts. Few realize the risks of parasocial relationships: they form fast, after just one watch of Once or a few episodes of Glee, and we are usually witnessing the best and most curated version of a person. You’d idolize anyone if you only knew the best things they’d ever done, and would feel crushed and betrayed when you learned about the worst.
Last fall, my grandfather died. He was, in most respects, a bad father. Neglectful and a drunk, it took until he had grandchildren to attempt to reconcile with his only living son, my father. At his funeral, however, my father delivered a eulogy through tears, trying earnestly to wrap his sadness and his grief and how much he missed his father around all the pain he had suffered because of him. Most of the audience understood those complexities, and knew my father would, in the end, speak well of the dead. Had he stood beside the coffin and delivered a diatribe of grievances, everyone would have been appalled. Empathetic, perhaps, to the fact that grief often tangles with anger, but appalled nonetheless.
I do not know how to factor the accusations of his creepiness into my strange, hollow-hearted, parasocial grief for Hansard. The facts of his relationship to Irglová make me uncomfortable; but, then again, those are only imagined. The reality may have been worse, or it may have been better. When people write that they personally experienced his sleaziness or witnessed him creeping on a friend, or that he treated them with the utmost kindness and respect or cared deeply for all the people he knew—when I read these comments, I know they’re all written under the proofless anonymity of the internet, and I take them with a grain of salt. But the facts remain, and they are uncomfortable. They met when she was young, but I loved his music. I spent ten months listening to his music every day; I made beautiful memories of watching my friends sing and play his music; I tried to get inside his head, understand his mind. Selfishly, that is my concern—that I admired a man who turned out to have been unworthy of my admiration.
I can only imagine that Irglová may feel a similar mess of emotions at Hansard’s passing as my father felt about my grandfather. But I can’t say for sure. Neither can any of these strangers on Reddit. While personal grief concerns the unraveling of the tangled knot of the heart, parasocial grief is a scramble to construct a legacy. Particularly in the case of sudden, tragic celebrity deaths, when the person is too young for their life and work to have yet been assessed, the public leaps to examine them in a slapdash rush. Your voice, it feels, your Tedium blog post or Reddit comment, can propel a movement and help create a piece of public knowledge. It feels like power.
That power is an illusion. Legacies are built of sand, and over time erode and reshape and dry out into something solid. When anyone on the internet can have an opinion, whether they believe Hansard was a saint or a horrific sinner, it feels like we’re all just throwing mud around.
My father was not concerned with his father’s legacy. He was grieving in a real, personal, profound way, expressing the complexities of his memories the best way he could. I don’t know how to grieve for a celebrity; I do not mourn the loss of a man, but of a myth. A powerful, important, immortal voice in my head has been rendered human, and that hurts. It is uncomfortable, a bit shameful, falling into the mess of idolatry and the confusion of art and artist. I must forgive myself, and remember my father, and mourn as he did.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
