Panic over. Kylie has had her breast cancer operation and her doctors expect a complete recovery. Many will share her relief. John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, spoke of his nation's sadness and his 'shudder' at hearing of the singer's illness.
Lynton Crosby, Michael Howard's election guru, wants the Tories to 'take lessons' from his compatriot. 'She's not a quitter and she never whinges,' he tells the Spectator.
There are many other stakeholders in her future, from Madonna to the thousands of fans who will not now see her on her world tour, in pheasant's plumage and perched on a crescent moon. Kylie's story is for anyone who felt a kick of shock that a diva who looked as non-degradable as vinyl could get cancer. It was like learning that Barbie had glaucoma.
Except that Ms Minogue, contrary to last week's reports, was not the doll-like icon for women who never age or cry or let their smiles dissolve, even when their corsets bite into their 16-inch waists. She has admitted often coming off stage in tears. Two years ago, she had 'a small nervous breakdown'. It took a cancer biopsy to change the myth of perfection into a more useful parable.
Kylie's illness emerged in a week even more dominated than usual by mortality. Mr Blair had a slipped disc (cue ominous headlines), the GI diet was declared a defence against heart attacks (cue cheerful ones), and the safe alcohol limit for women was reduced again, to something like one Babycham per fortnight. In the High Court, judges took evidence on when life should end. In South Korea and Newcastle, stem cell scientists announced another step along the road to immortality.
Next to such progress, a pop star's illness might seem to have little public relevance. Non-famous women with unglamorous brands of cancer might have wondered what the hell the fuss was about. Others may have sensed another bout of international hysteria coming on. As grieving for the previous Pope and Diana proved, nothing rallies mass feeling better than a sick star, unless it is a dead one. Illness magnifies fame or whips it up from nowhere. Abigail Witchalls, the young mother slowly recovering from the attack that almost killed her, is practically the best-known woman in Britain.
Then there is the consensus view that Kylie is 'battling' against cancer, as if fear and despair are disreputable responses to illness, not to mention probable short-cuts to sharp decline. Though the moralising of the 19th century should have perished long ago, red-top sub-editors are still with Schopenhauer in suspecting that disease marks a failure of the human will.
But Kylie's coverage has not, in general, been morbid or misleading. The fantastic breakthroughs in treating breast cancer have been rehearsed and stigmas brushed away. Not many generations have passed since WH Auden analysed Miss Gee's terminal cancer: 'Childless women get it, and men when they retire. It's as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.'
Echoes of warped fatalism still linger, but they have mostly been replaced by hope. Equally, Saint-Saens' view that 'Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic' has given way to Kylie fans flocking into Dorothy Perkins for their pink wristbands. No doubt breast can cer is being romanticised, in a way that lung and bowel cancer are not. But awareness matters, and life is a better fashion statement than death.
Even so, there is some carping about Kylie. Why make her the focus of so much attention? That is rather to miss the point. The statesmen who remember her dimly as the one with the electric perm from Neighbours and the teenagers beguiled by disco girl sequins have one thing in common. Every one of them thinks fearfully about getting cancer. The Kylie story is really about us and, in particular, our squeamishness about any hint of death.
The cheapness of other people's lives - in Iraq, or in Zambia, where the average citizen dies at 33 - has only enhanced the preciousness of our own. Rich Britons are programmed to die at 78, but that span expands by two years in every decade. Still, the luxury of an elastic old age remains unmatched by ideas of how to use it.
The more science nods at almost everlasting life, the less society knows how to harness the bonus years. Pensions are a mess, the elderly are being ripped off by care homes, and no one has devised a fresh future for the old. Appalled that we might live for ever, we are even more offended when we do not. Recurring rows about euthanasia are not primarily about the clash between God's will and that of mortals. Death has become such an aberration that we have forgotten how to die.
Almost everyone, in an age of stress and overwork, is expert in the politics of time management. Almost everyone is ignorant of the politics of time passing. Hence the frisson at Kylie's age. Thirty-six may be young to get cancer, but it is old to be a pop princess. No one who invests effort and money in staying young likes contemplating the thin margin between extruded adolescence and serious illness.
According to her doctors, Kylie is going to be fine. Her cancer was caught early, but her saga has messages beyond vigilance. In the 1970s, another young woman, the American writer Susan Sontag, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sontag, who died last Christmas, wrote several essays claiming that illness was a metaphor. Tuberculosis was a disease of passion, cancer one of repression and so on.
Her point was that such pathology was rubbish. Illness was just illness, and dressing it up in lurid terminology made it worse for sufferers. Thirty years on, the idea that people get the diseases they deserve is perceived as garbage. Other myths survive.
There is still a notion that science is always trumped by God. The American website PinkRibbon.com lists famous people who died of cancer as 'in the arms of the angels'. The Mirror led on 'Kylie being nursed by nuns', almost as if a corned beef salad served by a sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was better than the heathen sort. Fans have been organising prayer vigils on the internet.
But Kylie's story is not about religion. It is not really about science, except in highlighting that women are still being failed by lack of money for new drugs. It is not principally about Kylie, though public grief comes with a heavy price tag. The deal for all that sympathy is that she, a poster girl for cancer, gets well and acts courageously at all times.
Kylie, though, has something else to offer, besides the happy ending her fans require. Hopefully, they will get it, with a codicil. There are more heartbreaking accounts, and more inspiring evangelists, but Kylie has inadvertently delivered the lesson that priests and doctors struggle to impart. She has made people consider what it might be like to die.
