I pray to God Prince was dead by the time he hit the floor.
I pray Prince wasn’t cognizant, even for a mite of a moment, that he was dying alone in a nondescript elevator, in a Wonder Bread suburb of the racially-fractured city that was one day too late in telling him his hometown—blacks, whites, the whole Crayola box of colors and ethnicities—loved Prince as much as he loved Minneapolis.
Because there’s one thing I’m positive I know about Prince. After knowing him in forever-alternating cycles of greater, lesser, and sometimes not-at-all friendship over the final 31 years of his life, until our final peculiar phone conversation three weeks before he died: His greatest—and perhaps only—fear was dying alone.