It’s oddly reassuring to rub elbows with famous people who had prostate cancer, like Dan Fogelberg, the soft-rock singer who grew up here in Peoria, Illinois. I can walk to the places he lived, went to high school, and to Bradley University where his dad was the band director and let him conduct a rehearsal when he was 14. Fogelberg’s songs like “Leader of the Band” and “Longer” were a mainstay of the soft-rock era of the 1970s, ’80s, and early ‘90s.
Franz Liszt and grief
As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. And while we expect this, it’s still a shock. Some die from cancer, some from old age or accidents. Too many die young, we think, before their time. Yet a life of attention and service to others is not diminished by the shortness of time, nor does the length of a life bestow any particular honor.
Not realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come, we can be so unnerved by an unexpected death that we wake up every morning fearing that someone else we love has died. And every strange ache, every cough and tick of our body, can make us fear that something is seriously wrong with us and we’re next to go.
