The first time actress Shannen Doherty announced she had breast cancer, Kate Drabinski admits she didn’t pay that much attention. But that was before she got it herself.

“Then I started reading about her story, and it was so scary because we were the same age when we first had it,” said Drabinski, now 49. The Charles Village resident was a big fan of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the uber-popular show that made Doherty a star as Minnesotan-turned-Californian transplant Brenda Walsh. Drabinski always related to Brenda, but when the actress died last weekend at 53, the connection was imbued with the scary truth of what cancer and aging mean, and how the story can sometimes end.

“Both of us were doing what we were supposed to do, and we both got it again. And then she died,” said Drabinski, who was scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy less than 24 hours after we spoke. “It’s extremely disturbing when they die. I never forget that I might die from this, like Shannen Doherty died from this. I have mortality right in front of my face.”

That’s uncomfortably true. With “90210,” “Charmed” and “Heathers,” Doherty was an undeniable Gen X icon. Her death was not only sad because, like the passing of her “90210″ boyfriend Luke Perry in 2019, it eats away at the fabric of our youth, but because it further cements the truth that if our famous contemporaries are getting cancer and having strokes and heart attacks, we can, too.

“The universal experience is to recognize one’s own mortality,” Marc May, associate professor of Electronic Media and Film at Towson University, wrote in an email. “Pop culture adds the wrinkle that certain icons are the equivalent of our friends. It feels like we have an intimacy with them.”

That intimacy is exacerbated when those icons visit us weekly in our own homes on TV. ”Losing Shannen Doherty is like a whole generation that watched ‘90210′ and/or ‘Charmed’ losing a friend all at once,” he wrote. “A bigger star in box office standing could have passed on, but Doherty feels a bigger deal.”

It’s a huge deal. I was always a fan of Brenda Walsh, who was, like me, a twin who moved away to a new school and had to fit in. (She was also the victim of the world’s coldest breakup when her hot boyfriend and best friend cheated on her while she was out of the country. I will never get over that.)

As a woman who understands that my worth is often determined by other people’s impressions of me, I was drawn to the actress as someone who kept getting written out of hit TV shows because she was allegedly difficult. Today we can look back and balance her possible bad behavior with a media landscape that loved tearing down successful women. She was also born about a week before I was in 1971, and her real-life vulnerability about her past and her illness made her even more relatable.

“Having to watch her having, essentially, her body fight against her soul? I’ve been there,” said Kathy Yost, 47, of Pasadena, herself a cancer survivor and a big fan of “90210.″ “I’m not sure what was going on the other end, but I watched her lift people up all the way to the end. She was posting up to the day before she passed.”

There’s another reason Doherty’s death is personal to me. When my husband, Scott, died of a heart attack at 44, a lot of the condolences centered on his relatively young age. Nine years later, at 53, a heart attack or stroke doesn’t seem that unusual. No one would ever say that I’m too young to die from some health-related ailment.

Blaire Postman, 54, a comedian who lives in Little Italy, thinks that Gen X’s signature state of jadedness and survival of social and cultural upheaval at a young age stunted us and led us to assume that we were immune to death. “I don’t think we noticed we were getting older, in good ways and maybe not in great ways. There was a denial,” she said. “We were like, ‘Nothing’s gonna shock me.’”

But now Postman’s husband is a colon cancer survivor. Though he’s good now, “his diagnosis was a shocking thing, even though we had clearly aged. We felt, ‘Oh, we have this totally youthful outlook, and I don’t think these things will catch up with us.’”

When I was lamenting the loss of Doherty — as well as Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth, people Gen X grew up watching — a younger person said that our generation should be used to celebrity deaths, considering the 1990s-era passings of Kurt Cobain at 27 and River Phoenix at 23. But those icons died young of very specific causes while living a lifestyle far away from so many of us. Heart attacks in your 50s, on the other hand, are far too common.

“We saw that in the same way our parents say their idols die of drug overdoses, like John Belushi. But they seemed like a carveout. They had a dark path,” Yost said. “We thought, ‘I am less likely to go to that club and do whatever substances they did.’”

Another thing that too many of us have in common with Doherty is the tragedy of the American health care system. Even she, a famous person, missed a crucial appointment that could have led to earlier detection because she didn’t have health insurance at the time.

“That’s the story of a lot of people. She was on a hormone blocker that she took and stopped taking, and then regretted not taking it. She blamed that on her reoccurrence,” Drabinski said. “I was taking them and I still got it. I want to tell her, ‘It’s not your fault.’ I wish I could tell her.”

When I talked to Drabanski on the eve of her surgery, she said that Doherty’s willingness to be public about her illness was inspirational. “She said that it was OK to talk about cancer. She was like, ‘Here is what it feels like to have radiation on your brain. Here is what it’s like to have your head affixed to a board.’ It made anxious people like me feel better, and it’s so helpful because it encourages other people to do the same.”