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While the passing of Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch is sad for probably a couple dozen distinct reasons, I find it’s possible to be less bummed about it by concentrating on the example he set with the way he lived his life—that is, wringing every drop of joy and love and everything else that makes life worth living from every experience he encountered, so that he packed at least two lifetimes’ worth of all those things into the abbreviated time he spent on Earth. And I’m happy to see that so many other people have chosen to remember him this way—there’s been no shortage of touching and heartfelt eulogies written about him, but it’s good and proper that many other tributes focus instead on the way he lived and not the way he died, and on the lessons that we can all learn from him.
