Leroy Sievers, one of the blogosphere’s most courageous members, left the world as we know it this past week-end. A journalist of impeccable credentials and a genuine human being, Leroy succumbed to the cancer that had run rampant through his body and that formed the topic of his blog My Cancer.
There are already many formal recountings of Leroy’s life, written by those who knew him far better than I did, published and easily accessible. However instead of his remarkable journalistic career, what I shall remember most about Leroy is the remarkable courage and openness with which he used his blog and the periodic messages he broadcast on National Public Radio to invite all who cared to participate into his life and fight with cancer.
As a cancer survivor myself, there were days in which Leroy’s broadcasts or his blog posts brought back all too vividly the fear and pain from my own experience that I thought I had long since buried. There were other days in which he conveyed such remarkable courage that I felt great shame in looking back upon the way in which I sometimes faced my own experience. However I most commonly found myself feeling a sense of solidarity with Leroy.
One of the things that plagued me most in my own experience with cancer also obviously bothered him as well – isolation; the feeling that, despite being surrounded by family and friends all wishing you well, you are all alone. Leroy fought this by cultivating out of his own words the global community that daily, either silently or openly in comments on his blog, wished him strength, courage, healing, and peace. He fought the pain, the fear, and the darkness that hides the seemingly countless other negative emotions that accompany cancer by bringing them all into the light for everyone to see and battle together. From, for, and with the very world-wide community he created through his blog and his broadcasts, he brought strength and hope to many by his proving the truth in the maxim he so often proclaimed, “None of us walks this road alone.”
Peace to you Leroy, peace to you indeed.
