Death Comes with a Heartfelt Message

Very few things shake us like death. Death stops us in our tracks.
The sports world was hit with two prominent losses in the last week that froze me.
Joe Kennedy, a free-agent pitcher who played for Oakland, Arizona and Toronto last season, passed away at the young age of 28. He had a wife, a 1-year-old kid, and his wife was pregnant with their second kid. Those two children are going to grow up without knowing their father. That’s the kind of heartbreaking news within a story that brings out the emotion in me.
Tuesday morning, I woke up at 5 a.m. to an analyst on ESPN2 saying “we have some sad news…” and he went on to break the news that Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor, all of 24 years old, had died from complications to a gunshot wound he received 24 hours earlier when someone tried to break into his Florida home.
Anybody that knows me will tell you I love sports, maybe a little too much. I take wins and losses pretty seriously. After I spend almost 12 hours on a Saturday watching college football, I feel like these athletes have become a part of my extended family. Sort of like distant cousins you know exist, but you never physically meet.
So whenever an athlete dies, I take it a lot harder than everyone else.
Taylor’s death upset me because I honestly liked Taylor as a player. He was a dominant Free Safety, which is a position on the football field that I love. Taylor’s job was to sit back and strike when the ball was in the air. My dad asked me if he was a good player and emphatically, I said he was a great player.
ESPN.com’s Marwan Maalouf broke down Taylor’s skills in a recent blurb for Scouts Inc., saying “Not only were Taylor's coverage skills exceptional, he brought a physical mentality and toughness that was well respected around the league. A devastating hitter, Taylor wanted to leave his mark in every game by letting receivers know that they had better think twice about going up for a ball in front of him.”
When I see coverage of the memorials that Washington fans are holding for Taylor, I have to fight back a few tears. He was only a kid, just one year older than me.
But I think we can learn something from Kennedy’s death, though. As of right now, everything about his death is speculation, but the people close to him believe he had an enlarged heart and that probably played a role in his death.
According to WebMD.com, there are three types of an enlarged heart and many people who suffer from any of the variations don’t have symptoms. The only version that lists “sudden death” as a possible symptom is Hypertropic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), so I’m assuming that this is the variation that Kennedy had, if in fact he had an enlarged heart.
Kennedy isn’t the only athlete to die from an enlarged heart recently. Earlier this month, Olympic Marathon runner Ryan Shay, 28 years old, collapsed, and later died, during a Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials event in New York City. After the tragic event, his father revealed that when Ryan was 14, he had been diagnosed with an enlarged heart.
HCM is something that runs through a family history, or can associated with high-blood pressure. Hopefully, enough people will see the stories of Shay and Kennedy, and take a look in the mirror, and get checked out for form of Heart Disease. If these athletes, in pretty good physical condition can die from something like this at such a young age, then I think more people can.
If anything good can possibly come from these deaths, I would hope that the mainstream media would work together with a heart disease awareness group, and get the message out to viewers and athletes, and advise them to get regular check-ups. The deaths of Kennedy and Shay should warn people that you don’t have to be on the downswing of life to have heart problems.