Getting on for two weeks now, and Frank Sinatra is still dead. Not a single sighting. Not a sound, not a whisper. The Voice is finally stilled.
Not so, regrettably, the many commentators.
For those who have read even a fraction of the vast amount of prose devoted to the singer's demise, it must be clear by now that the whole world and everything in it, including all of its people and all of its problems, is explained for once and for all through the life and times and tunes of Frank Sinatra. Aficionados knew this already: his music is the soundtrack of their lives, as they will tell you, with no excuse for an overused metaphor, at the slightest provocation.
But there were many Sinatras, as we have also been regularly reminded.
There was Sinatra the man. Sinatra the crooner. Sinatra the womaniser. Sinatra the Rat Clubber. Sinatra the patron saint of Italian-American culture. Sinatra the master of phrasing.
And there must be many more Sinatras out there waiting to be discovered. We look forward to hearing of Sinatra the woman, Sinatra the sinner, Sinatra the Cartesian philosopher, Sinatra the deconstructionist critic, Sinatra the humanist ceili-band mathematical force, Sinatra the Thomistic theologian and Sinatra the postmodernist organic greengrocer.
Not surprisingly, various world leaders climbed on the tribute bandwagon. British Premier Tony Blair, for example, told us how he "grew up" with Sinatra. Tony Blair turned 45 the other day. Sinatra died at 82. This means that when Tony was two, Frank was 39. When Tony was 12, Frank was 49. When Tony was 20, Frank was 57. Maybe Tony is just not fully grown up yet and hasn't really grasped what it means to grow up with somebody, or indeed grow up.
One of the latest to offer her insights on the Sinatra legend is American feminist author Camille Paglia, professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
You might expect an ardent feminist like Ms Paglia to disapprove of someone as rabidly sexist as Sinatra. Not so. She tells us she was too young to be affected by Sinatra the singer: "However, I was enormously influenced by Sinatra the swinging sexual persona, as I saw him in movies, on TV and in gossip columns."
Many of us men must be happily surprised to discover that in many ways, according to the Paglia analysis, Frank was just like us: women "allured but remained a conundrum" to him. His "spiritual hungers" took deliriously pagan form: "Wine, women and song were his literal rubrics", and his "ambivalence towards women" was forged in childhood. Already, so much in common! I am a little shocked to learn that Frank was an ambivalent, but there you are. They make up about 5 per cent of the population, it seems.
Also, "he saw the tormenting truth about men's bondage to women".
This is debatable: Sinatra was about as bonded to women as orang-utans are to carp. But all that's only for starters. Frank must have had Irish blood somewhere along the line, because as Camille lets us know, he was at heart a mammy's boy: "Her omnivorous attention set up the psychic oscillation between craving for and rage towards women, that mercurial duality that gave him his dark vision of love."
Two more Franks! Frank the psychic oscillator; Frank the mercurial dualist. But the man suffered too: "Like many Latin Catholic men, he seems to have suffered from the Madonna-whore complex. His first wife, Nancy, the mother of his three children, occupied the shrine of the family home in New Jersey, while he felt free to roam the world and gather the rosebuds of the demimondaine, whom it is reported he would brutally spurn in the morning."
More for the collection: Frank the rosebud gatherer and Frank the morning-after spurner.
Frank, to the you in me and the me in you, farewell.