There is a lot of merit in this post.

I think back to my school days. A friend died of leukaemia at the age of around 14. Even earlier, another pupil at the school was run over by a car and killed. A chemistry teacher died. And the father of my best mate committed suicide. Another student I knew hanged himself.

All had a deep impact on a young person's mind, and showed that in all age groups there mortality rates.

The week after I left school, someone I had known and grown up with since Grade One was killed when his motor bike hit a car head-on on a country highway.

I negotiated my 20s and 30s without many personal traumas except four or five miscarriages and the deaths of an old schoolfriend and her two children in a car crash with a drunk driver. Then in my 40s, the mortality of my parents emerged. More recently, my ex-wife's husband -- a nice guy, by the way, and someone with whom I had played field hockey in my late teens -- dropped dead during a veterans hockey tournament.

Celebrities that I grew up watching or hearing have died. Motor sport has claimed many of my heroes, by some have lived on to old age. One extraordinary survivor is Jack Brabham, whom I have met and worked with.

Many entertainers have died.

Inventors, too, who have been responsible for some things that have had a remarkable impact on our lives -- Doug Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse in the 1960s and Chuck Foley who invented the party game, Twister.

Then there are people who you just know are shortening their lives by the way they live -- the pub is virtually their home, and cigarettes and alcohol their best friends.

It's sad but...

Death is a fact of life.