This week, the world of film criticism lost its most prominent and popular voice with the passing of Roger Ebert.
Ebert died Thursday at age 70, after a long and crippling battle against a thyroid cancer that had almost killed him several years before. Ebert lost his lower jaw following surgery in 2006, and lost his ability to speak to the masses the way he did on television for years when he sparred with Gene Siskel and then Richard Roeper on movie-review TV shows.
Despite that adversity, Ebert was able to come back and be as prolific as ever during the last years of his life, writing hundreds of pieces for print and the Internet and embracing social media and Twitter as his way to communicate with his legion of followers.
Just in the last few days, when Ebert announced he would be forced to scale back his workload and reviews due to the recurrence of cancer, he was looking ahead at plans for his website, for reviving the TV show he co-produced, and other efforts. Many of those were in conjunction with his wife, Chaz, who has been a rock by Roger's side in the last few years.
Today, people are pointing to Ebert as an inspiration for how to carry on with life in the face of such adversity and disability.
In many ways, though, his response wasn't much different from the way his long-time partner on television, Gene Siskel, reacted to his health problems. While Siskel was far less open about his own health difficulties than Ebert was, they were similar in this respect: despite brain tumors and pain, Siskel carried on his work as a film critic to the end, going so far as to phone in his movie reviews to their TV show with Ebert while still convalescing from surgery.
When Ebert paid tribute to Siskel on their TV show following Siskel's death in 1999, Ebert noted Siskel had kept on going because he loved being a film critic and felt the job was worth doing.
I'm convinced it must be the nature of the work of reviewing movies that kept both Siskel and Ebert going to the end. They both believed communicating to the public about the movies they saw was worth doing, no matter what.
As inspirational as Ebert has been the last few years in continuing to be as active as he was, I often wonder whether he would have carried on the same way had he been in a different line of work.
If Ebert had been in some job that had nothing to do with his love for the movies - a high-level corporate job, for example - I think the odds were pretty good he would have opted for retirement years ago.
The lesson here is that if you find your passion in life and find work you care about, then you won't ever want to stop in the face of advanced age or any physical adversity.
I believe it's true whether your name is Ebert, Siskel, Steve Jobs or anyone else for that matter. One person that comes to mind for me is "Hurricane" Hazel McCallion, mayor of Mississauga, who is still going strong in office at 92 years of age.
You see this all the time from people who find their work so important and so worthwhile that nothing will stop them for as long as they are alive. I remember Pope John Paul II in 2005 just before he died. He kept up public appearances and duties right to the end despite a multitude of health problems, including a tracheostomy that had impaired his ability to speak in his final days.
I notice major-league baseball announcers are a particular group of people who will carry on with their jobs until their last breath. Many of them keep broadcasting into their 70s and 80s.
There is always one more baseball game to see, just as there was always one more movie for Roger Ebert and other film critics to go to as well.
Well, I have really strayed off topic this week. I was going to write here about Ebert's impact on film criticism and his influence on newspapers and TV and most recently in online and social media, but here I am, going on about pursuing your passions and life in general.
I suppose that says a lot in itself.
Roger Ebert's legacy is not just about what he taught us and inspired us about the movies. It's also what he taught us and inspired us about life.
