A few days ago I was checking Twitter and saw that Craig Sager had passed away. I felt my heart wrench with dread. Another kind person passed away in 2016.

I felt bad for Prince, I cried for David Bowie, but now what? Although I didn’t follow sports, I watched the Espys and saw Sager’s speech and award.

Now whenever a person gets an award for fighting cancer it seems they don’t have much longer. Jimmy Valvano and now Sager.

I wonder when the time will come but the words of a dying man can tell all. In an interview with CBS news, Sager said. “There’s no guarantees. And for me, when they tell you not once, twice, three times, that you only got a couple of weeks to live or a couple of months, you have to determine how you wanna do that.”

Isn’t it ironic that people who tell us to live life to the fullest die so awfully? Robin Williams pops into my head. He’s been gone for two years but it doesn’t feel like it.

Williams was a fantastic preacher of happiness with many of his roles being about living life and seizing the day and embracing yourself. I always think of his recitation of Whitman in “Dead Poets Society” and I think of the laughs and ideas he gave us.

Walt Whitman… a great man. He told us to look at things not as they were and he taught us to break free. Whitman wrote, “O to have my life henceforth/ a poem of new joys!/

To dance, clap hands, exult,/ shout, skip, leap, roll on, float/ on,” but he died of pleurisy.

I feel melancholy for these men who teach and grow us. I want to say fight on but should we?

Bowie made an album before he died. The first lines from “‘Tis a pity She was a Whore” sums up all my feelings about this. Bowie sings “Man, she punched me like a dude/Hold your mad hands, I cried/’Tis a pity she was a whore.”

I don’t think this song talks about a girl; it’s about life and that it takes and takes and takes. Craig Sager feels like another nail in 2016’s sealed coffin. I’m done with this year, let’s move forward.