There's a distinction to be made between dying too young and dying too soon. The first connotes unfulfilled promise: Heath Ledger, for instance, was barely beginning to realize himself as both an actor and a human being. Moviegoers can only guess what he might have gone on to. When it comes to James Gandolfini, on the other hand, we knew—we'd learned, we'd seen—what he was capable of. All we were asking for was another quarter-century or so of basking in it. Granted, that "we" is generationally skewed. However awed the middle-aged likes of me may have been by Ledger's talent, twentysomethings no doubt felt his loss more keenly. But until I got busy Facebooking—the modern wake—after Gandolfini's sudden death at age 51 on Wednesday, I hadn't fully realized how much people (OK, let's be accurate: men) in my age bracket had come to think of him as our guy. Not only the best we had, but the one we felt the most intimate with—and the most defined by. That was...