Craig Sager

It's been an emotional couple of weeks in my on-line support groups. A number of people, very active in the groups, have recently passed away. It makes me sad when I go on-line to look at the groups' postings and none of the names look familiar; the voices that were the strongest when I first joined are not there any more. It makes me really angry at cancer.

And today I heard that Craig Sager passed away from leukemia. This past summer he was awarded the Perseverance Award at the ESPY Awards and I found his acceptance speech to be very inspiring (http://sports.yahoo.com/news/craig-sager-delivers-stirring-espys-speech-i-will-never-give-up-152655840.html). Especially these two parts:

“If I’ve learned anything through all of this, it’s that each and every day is a canvas, waiting to be painted — an opportunity for love, for fun, for living, for learning. To those of you out there who are suffering from cancer, facing adversity, I want you to know that your will to live and to fight cancer can make all the difference in the world. The way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel determines how you act.”

“Whatever I might have imagined a terminal diagnosis would do to my spirit, it’s summoned quite the opposite: the greatest appreciation for life itself. So I will never give up, and I will never give in. I will continue to keep fighting, sucking the marrow out of life as life sucks the marrow out of me.”