What You Never See Coming

I work in TV news. I deal with the news of death every day. It’s something that over the past 15 years, I’ve come to know. Sure, it can make you a little depressed. Sure, it can make you a little immune to the emotions that the passing of someone else normally causes but there are times when it hits you in the face and there’s no way to avoid it.

While looking at my facebook this morning, I saw a post by a “facebook friend” and decided to check out more about it.

It read: “he will be missed by us all, we love you Michael Corrado”

I wanted to find out what happened to Michael Corrado. I didn’t know him but for some reason I wanted to know more.

I clicked to his Michael Corrado’s facebook page to get more information. I read through all of his friends sending sympathies, prayers and tributes to this 22-year-old man. Earlier this week on his facebook, he’d updated that it was time to do laundry, someone had hurled a piece of profanity at him, not in a mean way, but the way you’d call someone an idiot and then laugh it off together.

Then I decided to find out how he died, it obviously wasn’t an illness, it was obviously sudden. I did a Yahoo! news search for his name and I found two links. One of them to a Plain Dealer article and one of them to a story on newsnet5.com.

To use the quote he “never saw this coming” is an understatement. You don’t know what’s next in your life. You can’t, no one can. Instead of having time with his family, they have to read the headlines in the newspaper, they have to hear the stories on TV or radio. Everyone’s lives have changed with some drunken downtown violence.

You can’t know everything that happened that night but one thing you can know is what happened, someone died who didn’t need to pass away. I’m sure we’ll never get past violence, anger and resentment but this isn’t the way to settle disputes, this isn’t the way, we should live.

Unfortunately, Michael will never be able to post another update his facebook status or respond to someone’s comment on his wall. Instead, the only posts that will be there will be from the people, his friends and his family, who tried to put their feelings into writing about how much they’ll miss him.