Tuesday, March 07, 2006
A sad couple of days...
Left: Dana Reeve in February 2005.The last couple of days have not been pleasant for a number of families. Just in the news, three families can be easily mentioned as grieving parties that will find the coming months very hard to live through...
There is that family up in Ontario, Canada that saw the newly-married couple in their midst get murdered on their honeymoon trip to Mexico.
There is the Puckett family, whose celebrated baseball hero, Kirby, died Sunday of complications following a massive stroke. He was, according to everybody else except CNN, only 45 years of age. (For some reason, CNN was the only one insisting that Mr. Puckett was 44.)
The CNN ticker was reporting, at the same time, that according to studies made, in a mere 25 years life expectancy could jump to the 100 years mark...
On Monday though, the Reeve family got another hard blow. Just as I blogged about the immortality of the soul, ironically... Dana Reeve, one of the most exemplary women of the last few decades, passed away herself at the age of 44. Shedding her mortal coil and freeing her immortal soul which is now, surely, reunited with her dear Christopher.
Dana Reeve showed as much courage facing the deadly C-word as her late husband did when he faced his own sad condition. Did you know that Dana Reeve was a singer too, on top of being an actress? She was on death's threshold and yet she made numerous public appearances, as recently as the 12th of January when she actually "looked healthy and happy as she belted out Carole King's "Now and Forever" at a packed Madison Square Garden during a ceremony honoring hockey star Mark Messier, a friend."
Mark Messier... maybe I was wrong about thee!
Dana Reeve was a non-smoker, yet she died of lung cancer.
A topic that has been seen here on TLB Prime before, is the alarming spread of lung cancer due to secondhand smoke - something NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO PUT UP WITH.
Dana's own mother had died of "complications from ovarian cancer and her own diagnosis came the next summer, two days after the lung cancer death of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, a smoker."
She was to die after valiantly fighting cancer for as long as she could, and it is, in the end, a mere year-and-a-half after her husband's death.
Dana Reeve wrote such wonderful things too, part of her legacy of caring spouse and a magnificent human being. "Something miraculous and wonderful happened amidst terrible tragedy, and a whole new dimension of life began to emerge," she wrote in a 1999 book, "Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends.""What we had yet to discover were all the gifts that come out of sharing hardship, the hidden pleasures behind the pain."
In Robin Williams' own words, "the brightest light has gone out," and as such, I could not omit to comment on this here, on the Luminous Blog. Of course, my opinion is that her light is not "out" at all - it appears snuffed out only from our perspective. The world is deprived now of this light, that is for certain. But her light lives on - it has ascended to be with The Light.
"We will forever celebrate her loving spirit," added Williams.
Yes, we shall.
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