To Die Young: Sunday musings…11/15/2026
“Do not go gentle into that good night…”
Life is short. How often have we heard that. From parents and grandparents and teachers and coaches. From everyone, especially when we are young. The truth, it turns out, is that life is actually quite long. Has been for a very long time, actually. A super-majority of us live quite long lives, at least those of us living in developed countries. “Life is short” really only applies to the terribly unlucky among us.
This week a rather young man, at least young to this 66 year old writer, cast off the chains of earthly existence at the age of 64. Dan Hicks, husband for decades, father of 3, and beloved by what seems to be countless friends and acquaintances, passed away after a brief, acute illness. He must have been quite a guy; every professional colleague who has spoken about him since his death finds themselves unable to continue through their tears.
Dan worked in television. His colleagues routinely dwell in a world of tragedies that they must describe and decipher, and yet his death left them so filled with sadness that they struggled to get through the scripts on their teleprompters. The same for the athletes he covered and their coaches. He must have been quite a guy.
“Smart lad, to slip away From fields where glory does not stay…”
His professional world revolved around athletics and athletes. Somewhere in my past I recall reading or being told that athletes have a death of sorts when they retire. Not a real death, of course, but the death of who they were as an athlete. The bigger the athletic acclaim the more poignant the loss. Although I was an athlete who enjoyed, and survived, very early success, the arc of my athletic career was more like an abbreviated long life: as I moved along to larger fields of play my successes came infrequently and were smaller upon arrival. Honestly, not really all that much to mourn. In that I likely have much in common with 99% or more of those who were once athletes.
Doctors are notorious for struggling with the end of their professional careers. Well, at least doctors who began their careers pre-2008 or so and have, or will shortly have to address the death of those careers. Another faux demise, of course, but doctors tend to have much longer careers at their “sport” than athletes, even athletes in non-injurious pursuits such as golf. A longer “life” in the profession tends to produce something that looks more like mourning when it’s over, especially when you couple that longevity with a similar “what I do has become who I am” seen in both doctors and athletes.
“Now you will not swell the rout of lads that wore their honors out, runners whom renown outran and the name died before the man…”
A young family doctor in his 40’s died this week after a freak accident here in Cleveland. A young man entering the peak of his career, a time when doctors, and their patients, enjoy 15 or 20 years of the intersection of skills and wisdom that have not yet begun to decline. By all measures this was true of Dan Hicks. Everyone commented on his nearly peerless performances as an announcer. How he met each moment with precisely what was necessary, neither leaving the important unspoken nor needlessly cluttering the moment by saying more.
What came next from those people who knew him is what has moved me the most. Each and every one of them remarked that he made every moment, whether on camera or not, about the other people “on the screen”. Everyone said something along the lines of “it was never about him, it was always about the people in front of him or around him.” Ah, here we start to come closer to why it is that I’ve been so moved by the death of a man I never met. Why my brother, closer to me than anyone other than my beloved wife, why my brother and I have talked and texted for days about a man both of us were separated by one degree a dozen times but never met:
Dan Hicks was terribly unlucky to have died young, but everyone who knew him was much, much more unlucky.
Therein lies the answer, right? At every death, be it the faux death of a retiring athlete or artist or anesthesiologist, or the final death arriving so tragically early for Dan Hicks, what we all wish for is to be remembered for who we were and not what we did. More than that, we wish for those memories of what we did to be those of someone who lived his or her life looking out and around at those with whom we lived. Memories of someone who thought first about those around them, how one’s actions hopefully translated into something that might be described as happiness for family and friends and random acquaintances or strangers who were nearby.
Some Sundays I sit down and I really have no idea where I’m headed. My buddies who are real writers find that comically obvious. Not so, today. Today I sat down in sorrow at the loss of a man who earned the love of pretty much everyone he met, and I wanted to honor not just him, but whatever it was that made him the kind of man whose instinct was to create not so much happiness within himself, but happiness around him. If I’d had a chance to ask he most likely would answer that doing so was actually the easiest way to make himself happy.
And I sat down to remind myself that doing what Dan Hicks did both at work and at home is how to live a life while we can. Life is long unless we are unlucky. We may certainly rage against the dimming of our own light, but the sad truth remains that our light is the one we have the least amount of control over. Today’s lesson is rather while we can we should strive to keep each light around us shining as brightly as possible. That’s something we CAN do. Be the one to make others shine brighter.
And if we did, wouldn’t it be nice for those we leave behind to gather and recall how bright their lights became when we’d been around to help them shine.
Dan Hicks 1962-2026. Grace and peace to your friends and family. May the memory of your light be a blessing.
And if I’m still lucky, I’ll see you next week…
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