It’s Tough for Fans to Say Goodby : Coping: For some, the death of a celebrity means the end of a ‘perfect relationship.’ The grief process, experts say, must be allowed to run its course.

Rene Grigsby hasn’t come to this spot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a camera. The 27-year-old tourist from Pensacola, Fla., has come to offer a prayer to the family of the man “who stood for everything good and right.”

“When Michael Landon died, it was as if someone in my own family passed away,” Grigsby says while standing in a swirling crowd of tourists vying for a snapshot of Landon’s star.

“I cried. So did my mother. We really believed that he was going to beat the cancer.”

Grigsby and her mother, Estelle, are not alone in their sorrow, in feeling a sense of loss typically associated with the death of a friend or maybe even a close relative.

“We always get calls when celebrities die,” says Russell Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Beverly Hills, whose services include a toll-free hot line and grief recovery seminars. The 8-year-old nonprofit organization, supported by private donations, also offers counseling to help people cope with divorce, retirement and other traumas.

The past few weeks have kept counselors busy consoling callers about the deaths of Landon, Lee Remick, James Franciscus and Bert Convy. According to staff members, these recent deaths also have rekindled sadness about other passings: Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis Jr., Greta Garbo.

“Every significant relationship must be grieved and completed or else we just get stuck in pain,” Friedman says. “Anybody who has affected our lives--a movie star, an athlete . . .--has become significant in our lives. It’s perfectly OK and normal to grieve for them, too.”

Experts such as Friedman say that for some people, the death of a celebrity means the end of a “perfect relationship” because “that person never judged us or criticized us.” A celebrity death can also be a painful reminder of our own mortality.

Friedman says a fan’s relationship with a celebrity “is very close to unconditional love. There are no conditions, no hooks. We grieve for them simply because someone we loved died.”

Jacquie Custer, who works at the American Institute for Foreign Studies in Los Angeles, says she found Landon’s death “devastating.”

“It was like losing a good friend,” says Custer, surrounded by foreign exchange students she has escorted to Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

“Little House on the Prairie” was “the one show I knew was OK to watch with my son,” she says. “It was as if you had wished Michael Landon had been your Pa, too.”

At the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, cards and letters addressed to the Landon, Remick, Franciscus and Convy families have arrived from fans across the United States, says Ana Martinez-Holler, the chamber’s publicist.

When Landon died last month, the actor’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was covered with flowers and wreaths from fans. A few days ago, the chamber received a prayer book with a letter asking that the book be sent to Landon’s widow. The letter, written by a St. Paul, Minn. man, also said that a Mass had been dedicated to Landon.

Popular culture expert and USC English professor Leo Braudy says celebrities such as Landon and Ball seem almost immortal to some of their fans.

“We all have two families: our real family and friends, and then our fantasy family and friends,” says Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Reknown,” a book about fame and its effect on society.

“When events happen in their lives, it affects our lives because those people--through a television show, a character they portrayed, a song they sang--mark periods in our lives. What we have is the sense of the passage of time through watching these larger-than-life figures,” Braudy says.

“When that famous person we admired our whole life dies, in a sense we get a sharper sense of our mortality. That person’s death emphasizes the arbitrariness of life and death.”

Braudy says when Marilyn Monroe died in August, 1962, the male suicide rate in the United States during that month increased 40%. He speculates that many men took their lives because their fantasy relationship with Monroe had ended.

Kim White, a financial consultant for Service One Corp., a credit card company, says the recent deaths of several celebrities--including Landon’s--remind her of her own mortality.

“It has heightened my level of concern for how I am taking care of myself: spiritually, mentally and physically,” says the 28-year-old Chatsworth resident.

The death of a celebrity may be difficult to deal with simply because many of us are not equipped to deal with grief in general, says John James, founder of the Grief Recovery Institute.

“Why don’t we talk about it? Because we are ignorant about people’s emotions and reactions to death. We don’t teach anyone in our society--both the griever and the people around the griever--that grief is normal and natural,” James says.

“Society minimizes pain as well as our ability to talk about what hurts us. For example, someone might say, ‘I watched a rerun of “Little House on the Prairie” yesterday and I cried because I felt sad about Michael Landon’s death.’ The reaction to that statement might be, ‘He’s only an actor, it’s not as if your brother died.’

“When my grandfather died, I was devastated,” says James. “What I heard from people was, ‘Don’t feel bad. You should feel grateful. You had your grandfather for 15 years.’ When JFK died, I was devastated. People were saying, ‘You should feel sorrow for his family,’ which I did, but there was an implication that I shouldn’t feel my own sorrow over the President’s death.

“When we try to intellectualize away our feelings, all we are doing is delaying the day when we will have to complete the experience of feeling our loss.”

Michael Chellel, who occasionally guides groups through cemeteries and memorials where stars are buried, has seen people weep at the graves and crypts of such stars as Gracie Allen, Monroe, Alan Ladd, Natalie Wood, Stan Laurel and Rudolph Valentino, who still receives flowers every Monday from a mysterious woman sheathed in black.

“Some people are still grieving,” Chellel says.

“We don’t have royalty in this country. We have movie stars, and movie stars are like an extended part of our families. We think of them as our brothers, fathers, husband, mothers, sisters and wives,” he says. “When they die, so does a piece of our hearts.”