For anyone trying to reach me the next few weeks, it’s nothing personal if I don’t get back right away. I have the good fortune to be marrying the love of my life on Sunday, September 24th and then we will be going on a honeymoon for just about 2 weeks.

I solemnly swear to wade through the oceans of email that await me when I return and get back to everyone as soon as humanly possible.

Holy crap, there are only 5 days until the wedding!

That is all.

Oh, and Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I know it sounds really stupid. Obviously, I didn’t know the guy personally. Usually when a celebrity I like dies all they get from me is a "what a shame!" They keep comparing this to Princess Diana and when that happened, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Even when great Muppet writer Jerry Juhl died, I was just bummed out for an hour.

But when I found out Steve Irwin died I started to cry and have alternately been crying about it every third article I read or news segment I see. I have also become totally addicted to news about it.

I don’t know if its because of the nature of his show, how he used to talk right to the camera and how he always made you feel like you knew him and his family. I don’t know if it’s because of the fact that he was always so full of life and so enthusiastic about what he was doing. I don’t know if it’s because he made an entire career out of just being unapologetically who he was and then turned around and used every dime from that career for good and for his passions. I don’t know if it’s that he and his family and wife were this fantastic example of how love is supposed to work and how there is truly someone out there for everyone. I don’t know if it’s just the offence to my sense of how the world should work that I wanted him to someday die peacefully in his sleep at the age of 100+ to show all the naysayers who said he was nuts and that I feel like he deserved so much better than a random 1 in a million freak accident. I don’t know what it is, but it really upsets me that he is no longer in the world.

I read a really interesting (yet also depressing) article that I was going to link to but cannot find, that basically said that the reason everyone is so upset about this is that it’s a reminder of our own mortality and a lesson that anyone of us could go in any freak accident at any time and to live life like to the fullest as Steve Irwin did. You juxtapose that with Steve Irwin’s last words (from what his friend / manager said) and here he was having the best month of his life, having just signed all sorts of deals and starting a new show with his daughter, when he dies doing a "soft spot" as they call if for his daughter’s show.

It’s good that he probably died instantly, as they said, so he probably didn’t even realize what was happening. But what his family must be going through, I cannot imagine. I read one article that said that Terri, his wife, had tried to call him to let the kids wish him Happy Father’s Day (the day before in Australia) only hours before his death and couldn’t get him on the phone due to poor reception and only managed to send him a text message saying "the kids send their love." Can you imagine how that eats her up?

The media was also revisiting a quote from her from several years ago where she was saying that if Steve had a job like policeman that was dangerous, she could never just sit at home and let him go out there so she needed to always go out there with him to watch over him. Put that in the frame of this where she was thousands of mines away when he died and I can only imagine what is going on in her head right now.

In the interviews, you also get a sense that his manager is beating himself up and feeling guilty about all of this since he is the person who, as he put it, pushed Steve in front of the camera for 15 years. You know that is why he is enduring interview after interview about this. In a way, he feels like it’s his penance for putting Steve in that situation in the first place and its like he feels like the least he can do is save the family and other friends from these interviews. He keeps breaking down as he is talking about it.

I suppose it makes sense if you look at it from a Final Destination viewpoint, that he cheated death so many times, it was only a matter of time before it caught up with him in some freakish way. But when you watch these old videos of him and look at old pictures and see his eyes which were so childlike and excited about everything and see his adorable little kids and how much his wife loves him it just plain sucks.

I don’t have any profound way to end this. I just needed to get it out of my system and have one last (hopefully) cry.