The Loss of 2016 - My Greatest of Them All.

Of all of the losses we had in 2016, I don't think any of them hit me quite as hard as David Bowie's passing did. While he has always been a hero of mine who dared to do what had never been done, and did so fearlessly and with such a self certainty that, while to some it may have seemed cocky, to the rest of us it was just the evidence of an artist who had a complete grip on his talents, and knew that boundaries keep you boring. He was anything but boring in his lifetime. He was Ziggy. He was Aladdin Sane. He was The Rebel. The Thin White Duke. The Starman. His comeback album "The Next Day" had such a fierce energy to it that, it declared with a loud shout and a foot stomp, "I am back! Now let's go dancing in outer space, and do it again the next day, and the next."

January 8th, on his birthday, he dropped the polar opposite of that album with the release of "Blackstar." I listened to it several times the day that it dropped and, it was such a dark & morbid work, I could only wonder what was troubling him so hard to write such an album of despair, pain and sorrow. Of course, I found out why just 3 days after the album had dropped on Bowie's 69th birthday when I got the alert on my phone: David Bowie Dead At 69 After Long Battle With Cancer.

This was my greatest loss of 2016. Not that any of them were easy, but this hit me the hardest of all. I am still not quite over it.