My sadness today is profound, almost overwhelming, and I am trying to figure out why.

Obviously, the dog himself, a terribly sweet, ridiculously cute cocker-beagle mix, is the primary reason. He was my brother’s dog -  there’s no denying that – but he was really my first pet as well, my roommate and companion for the eight-plus years I lived with my brother after college.

When I came home from my first real job, he would greet me with that wagging stub of a tail and the butt jerking uncontrollably from side to side. I would lie on the floor, and he would pin me down, licking my face til I could stand it no longer.

I took him for walks every day. I taught him roll over – a trick we had to retire several years ago when it became too demanding for his aging frame – and play dead – which he did pretty well, except for that dang wagging tail, which couldn’t help but anticipate the forthcoming treat.

Lucky gave my life joy and meaning, structure and responsibility.

However, I moved out on my own five years ago, and while I saw Lucky at least once a week and would occasionally watch him when my brother left town, I was no longer much of a caretaker for the dog.

It was my brother who really had to put up with Lucky’s growing eccentricities – like the way he would whimper for hours on end and his increasingly picky appetite (a sure sign of sickness as this was a dog, after all, that would once eat the grossest things the New York City streets had to offer) – and who near the end had to give him the daily injections of IV fluid and clean up all the household accidents as his kidneys started failing more rapidly.

So while some of my connection to Lucky might have been lost over the years, I’m sure some of my sadness also stems from how intensely I feel my brother’s loss. I was there with my brother as he made the correct but horribly final and painful decision to give Lucky a peaceful end, and as he held the dog’s body in his lap one last time. And at least some of my pain and sadness must stem from knowing how badly my brother is hurting right now.

And I think there is something else that is making me sad. Something a bit more esoteric, a bit more selfish, and yet just as deeply felt: Lucky’s death in a certain way marks the passage of an era for me. I first met that dog when my brother, who had adopted Lucky a few months earlier, picked me up at the San Francisco airport when I moved there after college, armed with nothing more than a suitcase full of clothing and a journalism degree from Northwestern University. It was such an exciting time. My life and all its wonderful possibilities seemed ahead of me.

And for the next decade and then some, from one coast to another, from one job to another, Lucky was a part of that growing-up experience. It’s been fascinating to see all the people who’ve been part of my life the past 14 years – high school and college friends who came to visit, new friends, co-workers and colleagues, family members I got to know for the first time – who met Lucky and felt compelled to express their own connection to him on Facebook.

All those people who have been in and out of my life, and all those days, it seems to have flown by in an instant, and I wonder sometimes if I’ve made the right decisions in my life, if I’ve taken full advantage of the opportunities given me, and whether i am happy with where I’ve ended up.

Yes, I am married with a great wife, have my own awesome dog and am expecting a baby daughter in the fall, and I know that challenging and exciting moments are ahead of me. But that special post-college time – when my life and its direction seemed a complete mystery, even to me – feels like it now has passed forever along with Lucky.

Yesterday, my brother, his girlfriend, her sister and I took Lucky to the park where he had spent so many happy moments. It was such a beautiful day, with a bright sun and mostly cloudless sky giving off the gentle warmth of early spring. Lucky seemed very happy, taking in the familiar smells, feeling the soft grass beneath his paws, enjoying all the extra attention he was getting (though I’m sure all of the petting was a bit uncomfortable on his sore body, he took it like a champ, there for others until the end.)

Keenly aware of how easily we can take time, and loved ones, for granted, I told myself repeatedly to appreciate these moments, absorb them fully, take it all in, the beauty of the day, the pain of the impending loss. We would never have it back. Not the dog, not the day, not the emotions. None of it.

Now, as I sit here less than 24 hours later trying to recapture those moments, the memories are already fading. Pictures are blurred, hazy, insufficient.

And if that isn’t a reason for profound sadness, I’m not sure what is.

6) I regret being afraid of dying. In some ways, I feel my whole life’s purpose is to finally accept (at least on a Zen-like level) the inevitability of my death. Instead, the concept so terrifies me that it has clearly kept me from being as adventurous and/or productive as I could have been. A little caution can be a good thing, perhaps, but to live without fear of death sounds so freeing. (To be completely accurate, it’s more the pain of dying than the actual being dead part that scares me).

7) I regret being shy around girls. Ok, so it’s all good as I ended up finding this great awesome girl, but oh man, I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have caught the eye of a beautiful girl and wish I had gone up to her and introduced myself, make small chat, throw her a compliment, ask her on a date, etc. but instead only watched her walk away and out of my life forever. If I had chosen not to do any of those things because I thought it would be too forward and ungentlemanly or even creepy, that would be one thing. But me … I was mostly just scared, especially of rejection, and that’s just silly. Only the rejected can give rejection its power (Oh yeah, that’s like Tony Robbins good!)

8) I regret not being more serious about my writing. Even as a young kid, I fancied myself a writer. I remember creating a whole series of short stories, including a choose your own adventure (damn I loved those), about a porcupine named Kong. I had people who liked and encouraged my work, including a teacher I had in elementary school who took a bunch of my stories and compiled them in a pretty cool bound package and helped get one my tales published in a young children’s magazine (still one of my all-time great thrills).

I continued writing short stories and small pieces throughout college, but as time passed, I grew more discouraged. I would read stories by the masters, by authors I totally loved, and bemoan the fact I could never be as good as them. I experimented with longer forms of writing, including novels, but could never finish my projects. My imagination was lacking. My vocabulary was inadequate. My characters were cliched.

But if my writing was inadequate before, it’s only gotten worse. Writing is a skill that must be honed like any other and I unfortunately have written very little over the past five years – aside from these blog posts, of course. I think I convinced myself that writing was not as enjoyable as it used to be, but I wonder if maybe there’s something more going on here.

Because sometimes I think of how envious I am of the people who seem like they know what they’ve wanted to do since the day they were born, who have passion about something and pursue it with joy AND single-minded determination, a lethal combination for success. And then I think back to how I would spend hours as a young kid holed up in my room, composing stories, getting lost in the process, reveling in my own creations, and wonder if for me writing should have been that thing, and – note the emerging theme – I just was too afraid to pursue it. That my imagination was lacking, indeed.

9) I regret not doing more for my fellow man. This one is simple. I give to charity a decent amount, but not nearly enough. But more importantly, I should be more generous with my time. On this site, I’ve often complained about the lack of compassion certain members of society seem to have for their fellow humans, and yet I cannot honestly say I’ve done much to make a difference in this world. I talk a much better game than I do, and worry I just may be more selfish than I’d like to believe. Even when I try to do something charitable, I often do it begrudgingly and with the minimum effort, like the time several years back when I along with my brother mentored an inner-city student and helped sponsor his private Catholic school education. I did so little to really help that kid succeed, and embarrassingly, have since lost touch with him and his family.

10) I regret not going to California to watch the Northwestern Wildcats play in the Rose Bowl. OK, this is a small one, but when I was a senior in college, the Northwestern football team came out of nowhere – after decades of being the doormat of the Big Ten – to shock the world with a miraculous year for the ages. In one season, they beat Notre Dame, Michigan (in the Big House) and Penn State to win the Big Ten and earn their first appearance in the Rose Bowl in fifty years.

I saw every home game that year, and even a couple of away games, and that season easily stands as one of the top three sports fan experiences in my life. Many of my college friends went out to Pasadena during the Winter Break to cheer the team on, but I was a rather broke student and decided it would cost too much money. So I went home to St. Louis and watched the game on TV with some friends and family.

What a joke. You don’t get opportunities like that often, and when you do, money should hardly ever be the deciding factor. I know the advice to save and prepare for retirement or a rainy day has its merits – and especially sounds sage in tough economic times like the current ones – but money is merely a means to an end, nothing more. Be prudent, but have fun and take advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities when they arise. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

You can learn a lot from your regrets, and the only goal should be to minimize their occurrence as you grow older.

I didn’t go into much detail discussing the specifics of my actual regrets, but I’ve now decided to list the top 10 regrets of my life to date, thinking that it could actually be a useful exercise for me and an enjoyable, potentially educational, but very long read for others (so long in fact that I’ve decided to divide the column into two).

Over at dagblog.com, each regret will be accompanied by a related question in the comment section for you to answer.

Some of these regrets are small, some are huge. Some are in the past, where nothing can be done about them, and some persist today. All contribute to who I am, and as the new Senator from Minnesota was known to say in a previous life, “And that’s … OK.”

1) I regret not lifting weights when I was going through puberty. Let’s start off small. I think a bit of strength training – not a crazy amount, mind you, just a little weightlifting – is much more impactful when your body is developing and maturing. I’m not very body obsessed, but I think being stronger would have helped in a bunch of different ways. At the very least, it would have made me a better baseball player, which would have been nice as not making the high school baseball team is another regret of mine (although not worth a top 10 since I did try out 3 times, getting cut each year, and I give myself props for that).

2) I regret not making the top 10 of my high school graduating class. This is actually a bit of an anomaly because if anything, I think I cared too much about grades and schoolwork. But there’s a reason why this stands out as a regret. I remember going to my brother’s graduation as a junior high schooler and seeing the ten students with the top 10 GPAs get recognized for their efforts – they were asked to stand and the crowd gave each of them a significant round of appreciative applause.

For some reason, I decided there and then that that was something I wanted to accomplish. It became a goal – a ridiculous and nerdy one to be sure, but a goal nonetheless. And it was in my grasp til the very end, as I got all A’s until my final semester of high school. But I didn’t do the extra effort to sneak into the top 10, refusing to do the term papers that would have gotten me the ‘H’ honors (and 5.0) grades in history that would have put me over the hump. This sounds like a small, almost stupid thing but in many ways its indicative of a lack of single-minded determination, which I think the most successful in society seem to have and I clearly don’t (an issue that comes up later in this post). I had a goal, I should have worked just a bit harder to achieve it, plain and simple.

3) I regret not living an extended period of time in a foreign country. This is pretty self-explanatory and clearly, the easiest, best time to do this would have been in college, studying abroad for a semester or year. To me, it’s a sign of me living scared and nervous about trying new things.

As a side regret, though it isn’t necessarily my fault, I regret not learning a foreign language (or two) earlier in life. Like developing muscles, languages are so much easier to learn when you’re young, and I automatically give people an extra ten points of respect and IQ when I hear they’re fluent in multiple languages. Unfortunately, the arrogant American public education system didn’t include foreign languages as part of its early education curriculum back when I was a kid (I think it might now, but in any case at least American kids today have the bilingual Dora). In the end, I took 6 years of French in high school and college and still could barely communicate with the Frenchies when I was in Paris for a trip about ten years back.

4) I regret not being nicer to my mother through my teenage and young adult life. My mom is awesome. She’s funny and social and loving and sensitive and generous, and full of so many endearing quirks. Everyone loves her. I do, too, of course, but there was a time when she embarrassed me. OK, she still does, but there was a time when I was way too annoyed by my embarrassment and wasn’t always so nice to her.

Nothing major, just small cutting comments or a general lack of affection. I know where I was coming from and what I was doing – just trying to rebel a bit. Like all good Jewish mothers, my mom is a bit smothering and neurotic and for much of my pre-teen life I was a big mama’s boy, and I probably overcompensated in my attempt to shed that image. I can now fully embrace that I am and will always be a mama’s boy. But I know there were times I hurt her when she did nothing wrong, and for that I am sorry.

5) I regret giving up acting in college. In high school, I was in many of the plays, and had decent-sized parts in a lot of them, except for the musicals because I can’t sing or dance (We did Fiddler on the Roof, and I – one of the few Jews in the production – had to play a Russian because of my limited skills). I really enjoyed acting, and thought I was pretty good at it (I knew I had some talent when during a final exam in a freshman acting class I was able to cry during a scene in which I played a father who found out his wife had left him. The tears even surprised me.)

I wasn’t perfect,  by any means – watching old tapes, I cringe at some of the tics I brought to the stage,  but I would have liked to continue to pursue acting. Didn’t think that would be an issue seeing as I was, after all, going to Northwestern University, which was known for its theater department. Unfortunately, freshman year I got paired up with a roommate who was majoring in theater and it discouraged me when I saw his commitment to the profession. I thought about performing as a lark, not necessarily a career, and my roommate and his theater friends were approaching it on a much different level. So I chickened out and never pursued it further. I’ve taken a couple of acting and improv classes to try and rekindle the magic, but I’m afraid that dream may be dead.

Earlier today, my brother was bemoaning Farrah Fawcett’s death, trying to come to grips with the loss of his most common inspiration for those special, intimate teenage moments. (I kind of remember Farrah as being a sexy icon, but she was a bit before my prime mastubatory years).

Michael Jackson, however, was kind of like my Beatles. So I’m in shock, and surprisingly sad to learn of his premature death.

Thriller may be the album (and I do mean ‘album’) I remember playing the most as a child. I remember ordering and breathlessly awaiting a Michael Jackson biography from one of those Scholastic book forms we used to get as kids (I think it was called Thriller).

And despite all his successes, to me he seemed like such a tragic figure.

To honor of the loss of the undisputed King of Pop, I present the Michael Jackson edition of Questions.

1) What’s the first word you think of when I say Michael Jackson?

2) What Michael Jackson songs/albums do you have on your IPod?

3) Which Michael Jackson song is your favorite? (Jackson 5 Tunes included)

4) What about your favorite Michael Jackson video?

5) Which non-musical Michael Jackson moment/situation do you think is most memorable (eg moonwalk dance, neverneverland, plastic surgery, pepsi ads, his kiss/marriage with Lisa Marie, his pedophile trials, his fatherhood (baby holding), etc.)

6) Did you think Michael Jackson was guilty of pedophilia? If you think he was, as I do, do you also think, as I do, that he in some ways was as much of a victim as perpetrator given his unusual upbringing? Or do you think there can be no excuses for that kind of crime (pointing out that none of his siblings have ever been accused of similar behavior)

7) In the entertainment world, whose death do you think would generate more international attention and sadness than Michael Jackson?

8) Give me the over/under on how long it takes for a book publisher to take advantage of his death by coming out with a new Michael Jackson title? Will the book come out before the first posthumous record album? Will it be written by a Jackson family member, and if so, which one?

9) Why do you think Michael Jackson got all those plastic surgeries? Do you really believe it was medically necessary as he asserted once on Oprah (I think)? Couldn’t he tell the damage he was doing?

10) Some dude on CNN just compared Michael Jackson to John Lennon? Whose death was the bigger shock? Which one was the better performer? More influential musician?

I am uncertain how well this process will lend itself to thought-provoking questions, and I will certainly be risking great personal embarrassment by exposing my music collection to the dagworld at large, but I am game if you are.

I reserve the right to skip any song that has no lyrics, has nonsensical lyrics, or is just too damn mortifying (even for me, who may be the most shameless person I know). Power on … press shuffle … and here we go …

1) Gone Daddy Gone. Gnarles Barkley. A fine opener. Good, fun beat. Like almost all Gnarles songs, doesn’t overstay its welcome. My rating 8/10.

Lyric: Beautiful girl lovely dress. High school smiles oh yes. Beautiful girl lovely dress. Where she is now I can only guess?

Q: What percentage of former lovers have you kept in contact with?

2) Cry Baby, Janis Joplin. Has any singer been more fierce than Janis? Look at the lyrics alone, and it seems like she is playing the weak woman, basically begging a man to come back to her … and yet with that voice, you can’t help but also hear the implied threat – ‘You want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about!’ 7/10.

Lyric: I know you got more tears to share babe,  so come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, and cry, cry baby.

Q:  How often do you cry.  When was the last time you cried?

3) Circle Game, Joni Mitchell. Kind of funny that Joni comes right after Janis. They both have such powerful instruments with their voices yet use them in such different ways. I love songs – or any art, for that matter – that inspire melancholic, nostalgic thoughts, and this one does that for me. It’s a simple, beautiful melody. The lyrics and metaphor are a bit cliched, perhaps, but it doesn’t bother me one whit. 8/10.

Lyric: Take your time, it won’t be long now ’til you drag your feet to slow the circles down.

Q: If you could pick one year to be forever, what age would you choose and why?

4) Handsome Devil, The Smiths. Some songs I’m not sure how they got on my IPod. The beat’s OK but doesn’t do much for me, and the lead singer’s voice is a bit grating. But damn, the lyrics are nasty, so I have to give it some props for that. 5/10.

Lyric: Let me get my hands on your mammary glands, and let me get your head on the conjugal bed.

Q: What was your first experience with porn? What were your thoughts about it?

5) Believe, Cher. OK, this is one that comes very close to being too mortifying, and if I had any real shame, I’d never admit I had this song on this IPod. I sure as hell wouldn’t admit that I can’t help but wanna dance when I hear this song or that this ain’t even close to being the only Cher song on my Ipod. The computerized voice vibrato effects on this number are particularly gratifying. Really. 6/10.

Lyric: Do you believe in life after love?

Q: Well, do you? More specifically, the last time someone broke up with you, did you ever, even for a moment, think you wouldn’t be able to deal? How long did it take for you to get over it?

6) Think I’m in Love, Beck. This may not be one of Beck’s best songs, but it’s definitely one of his more approachable, comprehensible ones. Good beat. Like the violin transition about halfway through and at the end. No one does awkward, desperate romance better than Beck. 7/10.

Lyric: I think I’m in love, but it makes me kinda nervous to say so …

Q: Have you ever had feelings for someone, a friend perhaps, and never told them? Do you regret it?

7) Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Guns n Roses. Axl & Co. do a fine job with their cover of this classic Dylan song, revving up the guitars and rockness factor while otherwise staying mostly true to the original. Could do without some of the bells and whistles, like the gun sound effects and answering machine message, but you gotta love the way Axl belts out ‘Door-oor-oooor.’ 6/10.

Lyric: It’s getting dark, too dark to see. I’m feeling like I’m knocking on Heaven’s door.

Q: Do you want to be conscious when you die, to feel life leave you, or would you rather be unaware?

8) What a Wonderful World. Louis Armstrong. OK, it’s treacly, and trite, and we know the world isn’t always wonderful, or maybe even usually. But like Obama and his soaring rhetoric of hope and optimism, I believe in what Louis is selling. Ooooohhhhhh, yeeaaaahhh. 7/10.

Lyric: I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do? They’re really sayin’ ‘I love you’

Q: Do we as a general rule say I love you too often, sapping power from the phrase by using it too freely, or do we not say it enough, and by being so reserved not let people know how much they matter to us?

9) Let it be, Beatles. Just a beautiful song. Lovely piano playing, and god, Paul can sing. When I was in St. Louis for the Thanksgiving holiday, our family saw this Beatles retrospective at a local playhouse, and it was hilarious watching them try to recapture the Beatles’ magic. Beatles cover bands should be banned but Beatles cover bands with a fat and old Paul should be fined and/or jailed. 9/10.

Lyric: And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, There will be an answer, let it be.

Q: What’s your favorite Beatles song?

10) Black Acres, Elysian Fields. A sexy, sultry song to close it out. An entrancing bass beat, with beautiful violin and piano throughout. You can’t help but feel a little Randy (or in my case, a little Keri ) when the lead singer raspily declares, ‘Touch me now, Touch me, Black Acres are Claiming Me.” 8/10.

Lyric: He holds me up like a babe, pressing close. I can’t behave. I need to have this little death.

Q: If orgasms weren’t free, but could only be had by buying them on the open market, how much would you pay for one? How many would you buy in a week?

OK, this was fun, Will have to do it again sometime. Remember check out this post at dagblog.com for answers to these questions …

10) Ok, several days have passed. Are you still smiling and dancing, or do you find yourself suffering a bit from some sort of post-partum-like depression?

9) Not that I would know anything about this, but which is a more important element of looking good on the dance floor: Rhythm or self-confidence?

8) So I turned 35 this week. Is it lame that one of the things that most annoys me about this age is that I can no longer check off the 18-34 age group in surveys?

7) My awesome girlfriend got me one of those comfy leather recliners for my birthday (we once got in a fight because she said she thought those chairs were ugly and didn’t want one in her apartment while I insisted they were one of man’s god-given rights), and I have now fallen asleep while watching TV on that chair each of the past several nights. Have I become my dad?

6) Why or how did humans evolve so that they crave and demand variety in their meals? Every day, my dog acts like a Democrat who just found out Obama has won the presidency (i.e. like a delirious nut bag) when I take a scoop into his jar of food, even though I’m preparing to give him the exact same crap I always do. It seems like it’d be so much easier and more efficient if we humans could also be content eating the same thing every day.

5) Which is worse: Sarah Palin’s ignorance; the McCain advisers who chose Palin despite her ignorance; or the fact that those same advisers are now just piling on, anonymously leaking to the press more examples of that ignorance and suggesting she torpedoed the campaign?

4) One of the ironies of the election was that the heavy black turnout caused by Obama’s candidacy contributed to the passage of Prop 8 in California, which outlaws gay marriages. Do you believe the civil rights struggle of homosexuals is equivalent to the African-American struggle. If not, what is the difference? (This is not a trick question; I think there can be legitimate debate here, though in the end I personally don’t think there’s a difference.)

3) If you could find out the exact date of your death, but couldn’t do anything to change it, would you want to know? If you found out you were going to die within the next 12 months, what would be the biggest change you’d make in your life?

2) I have plenty of regrets in my life. One of them I remember well is telling a childhood friend in first grade that there was no Santa Claus, which was a really crappy thing to do (especially so cuz I’m Jewish). Do you remember when you first found out there was no Santa Claus and what was your reaction? (My apologies if I have once again spilled the beans and destroyed any delusions you may harbor).

1) Please look at the attached map below. It’s a graphical display of the voting trends in Tuesday’s election compared to 2004. The blue sections are areas where people voted more heavily Democratic; the bluer the section, the bigger the change.

Which of the following facts does this map reveal (Choose all that apply): a) The Republican brand and agenda is dying b) The Democratic brand and agenda is ascending c) Barack Obama was a better candidate than John Kerry or d) Damn, the South is disturbingly full of racists, esp. Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

1) Will there be more Jokers or Joe the Plumbers out there tonight? (If you’re answering this and Halloween is already over, reply with the actual answer)

2) Why do parents wait until the last minute to buy Halloween costumes? The costume place by me was absolutely crawling with kids last night, and there was a line to get in the store. Don’t they know it comes the same time every year?

3) If you win a World Series and no one in the world is watching, have you really won a World Series? (No offense, Philly fans, I’m just so happy you out-underrated the 2006 World Series, when my Cardinals won the title and no one seemed to care because a New York and Boston team wasn’t playing)

4) Agree or disagree: Obama’s non-selection of Hillary as VP was one of his best moves of the campaign. I say yes, and not because Biden’s been a big help (I’m a fan but he’s been a neutral at best), but by not picking Hilary, it led McCain straight to Palin’s frigid Alaskan door, and that’s a gift that keeps on giving (They’re now talking about her as a leading candidate in 2012, which boggles the mind but warms the heart)

5) Give me your best guess of the percentages for voter turnout as well as Obama’s popular vote total on Tuesday? I say 64 and 53, respectively.

6) Can you think of any any worse, more terrfiying way to die than in an airplane crash? I’m talking only about relatively common and immediate forms of death, so no death by testicle tickle torture or long terminal illness. Seriously, the idea of having to endure ten or more minutes of being able to do nothing but imagine your imminent death while being surrounded by screaming people and unbelievable turbulence as a 100,000 lb. aircraft hurtles earthward at an accelerating pace, frightens me to no end. But maybe that’s just me.

7) Genghis got me thinking with his W. movie review, what was the last good Oliver Stone movie?

8) When was the last time you listened to music on a terrestrial radio that wasn’t in a car? Talk about a dead medium. And good riddance.

9) It’s not because of radio’s demise, but I feel I’ve stopped learning about good new music. How can I fix that?

10) And finally, shifting to a much more exciting medium, please rank the following positive, life-changing attributes of the Internet in order of greatness:

1. E-commerce (Amazon, ebay, craigslist)
2. E-mail and IM
3. Comparison Shopping and Reviews
4. Online gaming (social and multimedia)
5. Facebook. Social Networking and the ability to transcend physical borders
6. Maps and Step-by-step directions
7. Free Porn available in any fetish imaginable
8. Search, Wikipedia and the ability to find almost any piece of info
9. dagblog.com
10. Other (List your own piece of Internet enjoyment)

Leroy Sievers was a respected and accomplished journalist, covering wars and conflicts all over the globe for CBS News and Nightline, winning a bunch of Emmys and a couple of Peabodys in the process, and yet I think it’s fair to say that none of his work likely had as much of an impact as did his very public battle with cancer.

I found his My Cancer Blog on NPR about the time I started this blog, doing research for a book idea I was considering. His site was a refreshing, funny, candid, brave, detailed look at the day-to-day reality of living with cancer and it kept me coming back regularly.

I wouldn’t be able to recognize Sievers on the street, and less than two months ago had never even heard of his name, yet I totally broke down when I logged on today and read that Sievers finally lost his 2 1/2 year fight.

It’s eerie now to go back and read some of his last posts, watching his messages became shorter and shorter, filled with cryptic references like ‘one last secret wave’ and ‘long and sleepless nights’, and then reading about his decision to bring in a hospital bed and, finally, a hospice team.

His last post was about ‘a boy and his dog,’ a heartbreaking reference to the stuffed animal keeping him comfort as his condition worsened.

It reminded me of watching my grandmother during her final days, sleeping fitfully and dreaming about who knows what – pleasant and pain-free days hopefully – as she snuggled a small throw pillow tightly to her chest, just as an infant holds a blanket. I guess if we live long enough, we leave this world not much differently than as we enter it.

I wasn’t the only one moved by Sievers’ blog. It clearly resonated with his thousands of loyal readers, all of whom seemingly have felt cancer’s sting in one way or another and many of whom revealed their own emotional stories in the comments sections.

These people were all strangers, and yet they came to the site each day, to send prayers to Leroy, to commiserate with him over his struggles and to discuss their own battles, to celebrate the victories, small and big ones alike, and to mourn the losses, hardly any of them small ones.

Mostly, they came to the site to provide a much-needed source of support and advice for each other. In other words, Leroy’s blog became this massive community, and it is quite easy to tell from comments left after the news hit that his readers took on his fight as their own, and that none of them will soon forget him or the lessons his life – and death – provided.

And that is truly an accomplishment worth celebrating.

I knew all this well, and yet when the time came to give my grandmother’s eulogy, I merely skirted these negative qualities, passing it off with a line like, ‘My grandmother in some ways taught me as much or more about how not to live as how to live.” The rest of the speech focused on her sense of humor, her vitality, and what is still – for me – the most relevant and core aspect of her life, the enormous love and support she showed me and the rest of her grandchildren.

I felt somewhat uncomfortable portraying my grandmother in such a positive light, when I knew the story was a much more complicated one. But speaking of the dead, when the full truth may not be all that heart-warming, is a tricky and delicate issue.

For instance, I took offense to many of the obituaries for Senator Jesse Helms, which glibly tried to explain away his strict segregationist philosophies (not to mention a number of his other hateful beliefs) by declaring them typical for other Southern white men of his generation. Unbelievably, some of the stories almost seemed to praise Helms for sticking to his guns while most of his colleagues eventually became more enlightened.

But it’s not just the way we gloss over the flaws of the dead that betrays the truth; we also tend to exaggerate their strengths as well. A recent example: Heath Ledger. I know he was a pretty talented actor, and from what I’ve read, a very decent fellow.

But being sad about troubled young actors and mourning the lost promise isn’t enough for our celebrity-crazed culture; we need to lionize them in the process.

So it’s no surprise that reviews for the new Batman movie and Ledger’s performance in it as the Joker have bordered on the hyperventilatingly positive (The AP called it an ‘epic that will leave you staggering.’ An Arizona paper called it ‘tantamount … to Michaelangelo’s David’).

I saw the movie this past weekend, and it was a decent B- at best, nowhere near as good as the fabulous Batman Begins. The plot was convoluted, the pace dragged and the climax disappointed. I have to wonder if critics in their reviews of the movie as a whole weren’t somehow influenced by Ledger’s premature death.

Now, Ledger did give a great, entertaining performance, about as nuanced and layered as you could expect for what is, in essence, a one-note (i.e. ‘fucked-up crazy’) cartoon clown villain.  But is it worthy of the multiple calls for a posthumous Oscar nomination? Too early to say for sure, but my guess is there will probably end up being at least five more impressive supporting actor performances before the year ends. Plus, I’m not sure if there’s ever been an Oscar nomination for an acting role in a comic book movie.

Posthumously giving an award nomination to a guy who probably wouldn’t have received it had he been alive certainly isn’t the worst crime in the world. It’s actually a nice gesture. But it isn’t exactly the truth either.

We still read, but our eyes glaze over anything more than a couple of paragraphs (140 words or less please).

We still listen to music, but now download a single onto our IPod one day and forget about it the next (how quaint the concept album now seems).

We still have friends, but now often substitute brief, vacuous messages or a ‘Second Life’ for physical contact and real intimacy.

Face(book!) it, we’re becoming Twitter-ized. (If only the Internet hadn’t made me so damn lazy, I’d trademark The Twitter Generation).

Yet despite all of the Web’s negative influences on society and human behavior,  the Internet remains the greatest invention of my lifetime, and I can barely imagine living without it anymore.

The other night, doing research on why we treat dying humans so much worse than dying animals, proved once again why the Interweb is so fucking great. I started with a relatively simple search on Yahoo and ended up lost in a fascinating – often only tangentially related – linkgasmic maze of stories, personal blogs, government sites, message boards, news articles, research reports and literature analysis.

I figured it’d be interesting, using Firefox’s library tool, to give you a brief recap of my hyperlink adventure (obviously leaving out the parts where I got sidetracked into watching some porn).

I knew I wanted to somehow incorporate Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle …’ poem in the headline for my post so I did a Yahoo search and visited a poetry site which included the full poem and a cool audio reading, as well as a number of other poems about aging. One of my favorites was ‘Affirmation‘ by Donald Hall (I love the line – “To grow old is to lose everything”), though I wasn’t sure what it all meant so I did another search and checked out this Yahoo Answers page.

Then it was on to the main subject. I did a search on ‘putting animals to sleep pain’ cause I wanted to see if indeed the process was as painless as I had thought. I read an ‘Ask the Rabbi’ site for one viewpoint and explored a couple related questions. I then checked out a more negative article which stated that the sight of the needle and the injection of lethal drugs causes animals way too much anxiety and pain. Next, it was off to a somewhat grisly report on lab rat euthanasia. And finally, I read the official stance from the Humane Society.

Next, it was time to research human euthanasia, and I started at the Wikipedia entry, where I learned more about some of the rather reasonable reasons people are against the practice (not the least of which was the fact the Nazis gave it a pretty bad name), which challenged my preconceived notion that it was all about religion.

The Wikipedia page led me to a message board discussion on the ethics of doctor-assisted euthanasia, where one of the responses mentioned the Nancy Crick case, which shows just how complicated the issue is (Crick said she was suffering terribly from bowel cancer and eventually killed herself, but apparently the problem was not cancer – none was found in the autopsy – but potentially fixable damage caused by previous cancer-related surgeries).

Reading up on the Crick case led me to the questionably named Compassionate Healthcare Network, an anti-euthanasia site that informed me of Oregon’s Dignity with Dying Act. It actually pointed me to some not-so-distressing stats regarding that particular law as well as one absolutely fascinating story of a woman putting the law in practice. The author notes that while the woman in the story lay dying, her brother read from William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality,’ …

… which led me full circle back to reading about poetry on aging. Of course, Wordsworth wasn’t a big fan of materialism and instead got turned on by ‘splendor in the grass’ and ‘thoughts … too deep for tears’, so I’m going to guess he wouldn’t have been a big fan of the Internet. As for me, I absolutely love ‘Intimations’, but damn, it’s long! Who’s got time to read all those words??