Chris Stedman had not heard from his friend Alex in a while. This wasn’t unusual. Alex often went off the radar. And besides, Stedman had taken a sabbatical from the internet for a few months to complete work on a book.
But soon after he came back online in December 2019, he received an email from Alex. It opened with the line: “Listen, I am writing to let you know that when you receive this scheduled email, I will no longer be alive.”
The rumours in the fan community were that ‘Alice’ was Britney Spears herself.
Sadly, it was true. Alex had taken his own life at the age of 31. Stedman was bereft. In order to cope, he threw himself into doing things to help.
“I knew his family was not in a position to pay the costs for the funeral, so I offered to set up a GoFundMe,” he says from his home in Minneapolis. “Then I asked if they needed help with planning the memorial, so I worked with his sister and best friend on that. Later, at the memorial, I had this moment when I just started sobbing, because I realised there was nothing else for me to do.”
But as it turned out, there was. And the result is a touching four-part podcast called Unread.
Stedman, who is 34, describes himself as “a gay atheist who is somehow teaching religion at a Lutheran university”.
“Even though I’m not religious, I’m involved in a lot of interfaith programs and my activism is focused on understanding,” he says. “As human beings we all have fundamental physical needs but we also need meaning and need to know that our lives have a purpose. I think that looks different for everybody.”
For Stedman and Alex, a big part of finding meaning and identity came through their shared fandom of Britney Spears. The two of them met in 2009 on a dating app, but flirtation quickly became friendship.
“Alex came into my life in a way I’ve since discovered he came into everybody’s lives, which was like a whirlwind. I was in grad school studying religion and I was on this particular track in my life. But he was messy, impulsive and whimsical, just following his instincts. I’d spent my life trying to prove to other people that I was worthy. But he made it clear he loved me for who I really was and he showed me another way of being in the world. For me, our friendship was transformative.”
A Britney Spears mystery that becomes so much more
Source: Philippines Alive
