Hot on the heels of learning of the death of Mary Travers, someone posted a comment, noting that Henry Gibson had also died today.

Does it seem like a lot of well-known people are shuffling off this mortal coil?

The New York Times takes a look:

One after the other, they were dying: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, all in the same week earlier this summer. Next were Walter Cronkite, John Hughes and, in late August, at a pitch point of public grief, Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Then on Monday, Patrick Swayze died after a widely publicized struggle with pancreatic cancer, only to be followed by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Wednesday night.

It has been, by all appearances, the endless funereal season, with a news media swarm on the departed and a parade of nostalgic tributes, as bloggers and Twitterers went on “celebrity death watch.” Even before Senator Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer Aug. 25, columnists wrote pleading laments like one in The Washington Post that said, “God, please stop taking away our celebrities.”

After Don Hewitt, the creator of “60 Minutes,” and Robert Novak, the conservative columnist and commentator, died within a day of each other in mid-August, the columnists and bloggers quipped that newsmen like Dan Rather — or anyone with pop culture celebrity status — should find a bunker.

But in fact, no more celebrities had died than in past summers, according to Lou Ferrara, a managing editor in charge of entertainment and lifestyle coverage for The Associated Press.

The perception of numerous celebrity deaths was not supported by the number of obituaries the news agency wrote, he said, because it was not a matter of how many died, but who.

Consider that along with the death of Mr. Jackson, there were two other profound, if less sensational, losses in the music world: Les Paul, the inventor of the electric guitar, who is credited with transforming 20th-century pop music; and Ellie Greenwich, less known by her own name than by songs she wrote with Phil Spector and Jeff Barry — some of the biggest hits of the 1960s, including “Leader of the Pack,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby.”

This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

Read on for more.