The death of James Van Der Beek, struck down at the age of 48 by colorectal cancer which in the crazy American healthcare system had forced him to sell the memorabilia of a lifetime to pay for his treatment, struck all of us old fans of Dawson Leery and his Creek to the heart. A pain similar to that felt for the untimely death of another actor famous for an iconic television character, Matthew Perry and his Chandler Bing. With two differences, which make the farewell to Van Der Beek more bitter.

The first concerns the fact that he, unlike Perry, didn’t even have the chance to give a happy final farewell to the character that made him famous, and to the public that loved him: at the time of the Friends reunion, Perry was in a bad way but all in all nothing suggested an imminent end to his complicated life. The recent meeting of the actors of Dawson’s Creek – or Dosoncrik, to put it in Italian – had instead already been the ominous omen that the absence of the protagonist “for health reasons” would be irreversible, and the images of his body now at its limits were a sentence that would be difficult to appeal.

The second difference concerns, inevitably and perhaps even disrespectfully, the character to whom we say goodbye in offering our final farewell to his interpreter and in offering condolences to his wife Kimberly Brook and their six children. Because if Chandler was the friend, the brilliant friend (Elena Ferrante permitting) who we would have wanted close to us in our moments of difficulty and his, to cheer us up with his light and help him fight his shadows, Dawson represented all of us who in adolescence were, or felt, a bit unlucky on a sentimental level.

Because sure, we loved Pacey and we millennials invented the term “shipping” by rooting for him and Joey (and for Mulder and Scully from The X Files), rather than for the crybaby Spielberg fan. But the truth is that, every time we were dumped, every time our teenage love affairs went badly, we were a bit like Dawson, wondering where we went wrong and why we couldn’t fulfill our dreams of love.

So today, when the unfortunate James Van Der Beek took away his and our Dawson forever, let us say goodbye to both of them and thank them for all those moments spent together. As background music for the last farewell, obviously, we expect the epic Aidonuonauei.