“You see, Jason was my son, and today is his birthday.”

With those words, an actress in her mid 50s became an icon, and would carry the legacy of a cheap summer horror flick for the rest of her wonderful life. Betsy Palmer, aka Pamela Voorhees, died Friday, at the age of 88 of natural causes at a hospice facility in Connecticut.

Actress and comedienne Anne Meara, wife of Jerry Stiller (who she had been in a comedy team with for decades) and mother to Ben and Amy Stiller, has died. She was 85.

The news was broken by Ben and Jerry Stiller, who gave no information on Meara’s cause of death at this time.

Meara had a career which transcended audiences and sometimes even genres. She appeared in films as diverse as the original Out of Towners in 1970 (sharing a short scene with the stars of that film, Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis); the highly underrated Lovers and Other Strangers released the same year; The Boys from Brazil with Lawrence Olivier in 1978; Fame in 1980, and also had appeared in many of her son Ben’s films, like Reality Bites, Zoolander, and Night at the Museum.

When composing an obituary, it is customary to include life accomplishments, surviving relations, and generally create a bubble in which to compress a person’s entire life, so that the reader gets a synopsis of who the real person was beneath it all. I am choosing to walk a different path today, while I talk to you about Seth Kushner. Seth was a great photographer and a spectacular writer/creator, make no mistake about that. His peers and his friends have been properly forthcoming on his Facebook page, and in other social media. But what struck me most about this amazing guy was his genuine love of his family, and of life itself.

B.B. King, one of the true titans of American music, particularly in the blues guitar idiom, died on Thursday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 89. It was reported that King passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Without question, B.B. King (born Riley B. King) had a last name befitting of his talents and ultimate legend. Trailblazing a soulful, clean guitar sound, in which both the most scant amount of notes or a flurry of them could create waves of emotion within the listener, King was all turns memorable and aurally insightful, and ultimately influential.

Grace Lee Whitney, best known to generations of Trekkies around the globe for her performance as Yeoman Janice Rand on the original NBC TV series Star Trek, died on May 1, 2015 in the small town of Coarsegold, California. She was 85. At press time, no cause of death has been released.

During Star Trek‘s first season in 1966, Whitney starred as Captain Kirk’s personal assistant, with her short skirt, intricate blonde beehive, and space-age clipboard in tow, before she was let go, but she did return for the motion pictures. While during its original run the TV show struggled somewhat in the ratings, its afterlife in syndication strengthened and the series soon become one of the most popular, iconic, and profitable programs in television history, a fever pitch of success and adoration which continues to this day. The success was a catalyst of the transition of bringing the franchise and the characters to the silver screen in 1979, and Whitney’s portrayal of Rand saw her promoted to Chief Petty Officer. She had become a lieutenant by the time she made her last appearance in a Star Trek film, in the sixth installment, The Undiscovered Country, released in 1991.