For the world and right now for me, it is difficult to realize or to even type, “Olivia Newton John passed away on August 8, 2022”. She lived to be 73, almost 74. Her next birthday would have been September 26.

In the history of world-famous singers or actors there has never been anyone who did it better than Olivia Newton John. She was never a diva, there were never any embarrassing incidents throughout her entire career or anything that was controversial. She devoted her life to helping animals, to saving the planet, to global warming and ultimately to curing Cancer. Oliva has a Cancer research hospital in Australia named after her: The Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, due to her tireless work with Cancer research.

Olivia was married twice, divorced once. She tried to start her own franchise business called Koala Blue in the 1990s that failed after a strong start due to the recession. In 1992, like so many millions of women, Olivia was diagnosed with breast Cancer and I remember thinking at the time, she is too beautiful, too cute, too kind, too good to animals, too nice a person to have anything bad happen to her. Not ever. Unfortunately, this is not how real life works — but it should.

In her lifetime, Oliva contracted Cancer 3 times, this last time was stage 4 and this is what eventually ended her life after living with Cancer in one form or another for 30 long years. Someone this nice, who has done so much good for the world should not have to go through something like this for so long. Just like Christopher Reeve with spinal injuries and Michael J. Fox with Parkinson’s Olivia’s huge world-wide celebrity put a giant spotlight on the never ending human health scourge of Cancer – much more than it would ever been without her. Olivia put her suffering with chemo, and fear of death for so long to good use – just like she always did – to help other people. In the long run, maybe one day we will all realize that Olivia’s main purpose was to become famous and beloved around the world, less so for her music and more for helping man kind to finally eliminate the disease of Cancer, forever. Too many millions still die of this horrendous disease every year despite billions and billions of dollars invested for research for many decades.

For many years Olivia lived with Cancer and endured this disease with so much courage and dignity that it surpassed any other celebrity we have ever seen go through something like this. Olivia Newton John not only showed the world how to live, she also showed all of us how to die.

When the news about Olivia was announced yesterday, many of her fans, starting with me, have already known for years that this day would come eventually. Some two years ago, there was a news report that Olivia had died that turned out to be fake, but it was this kind of a reminder and realization for so long that made yesterday just a little easier to accept.

Now we all have to move on, as we all always try to do, But this time, without Olivia Newton John. How do we do that? For me, things already seem to be off, not right and skewed in some unidentifiable way.

For her whole incredible career that peaked in the 1980’s Olivia never knew the value of her singing career to so many average depressed people like me, trapped in their cars, trying to survive another bad day, another bad job, another horrible commute. Then with the random turn of radio dial to another station playing one of her songs, for those few minutes, life just seemed to be a little better.

Gone way too soon. Life will never be the same again without her.