SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

My friend The Real Sam Johnson would have been 43 today.

I say “would have been” because Sam passed away back on April 21, after a long hard struggle with end stage renal disease.

I call Sam my friend because, even though we never met in person — Sam lived all the way across the continent in Savannah, Georgia — Sam was one of the first bloggers whose writings I followed on a regular basis. He was also among the first to read my incessant babble when I began spouting forth nearly five years ago.

Sam and I shared a number of factors in common — our backgrounds in radio broadcasting, our affection for obscure television programs, our mutual fondness for comic books, off-kilter humor, and bizarre pop culture references. We regularly commented upon — and now and again, even wrote about — one another’s blogs. From time to time, we also corresponded off-blog. Sam was the only person in the blogosphere who ever sent me his home telephone number, and said, “Call me anytime.” And I knew that he meant it.

Because of Sam’s kidney disease, he underwent dialysis three times a week. He desperately needed a kidney transplant, but for a number of reasons I won’t go into here, he never received one.

Despite his poor health, Sam lived a full life with robust good humor and joie de vivre. He was loved by most who knew him, and by many who didn’t know him as well as they would have liked.

Count me among the latter.

I’m proud to say that, though we never sat across a table from one another or slapped palms in celebration, Samuel Marquieth Johnson was my friend.

I miss him.

Happy birthday, Sam.

This entry was posted on June 14, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Blogosphere, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, Hero of the Day, SwanStuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.