Dear 2016: In your last few days, can you just mellow out?

Well, that pretty much seals the deal for 2016. With this morning’s death of Carrie Fisher – following the loss of George Michael over the weekend, the rest of the year’s long line of notable celebrity deaths, and an election-season collapse in public civility and discourse that doesn’t bode well for our republic – I think most of us are ready to bid adieu to what feels like a particularly yucky 365-day journey around the sun.

And now I just learn that Richard Adams, who wrote “Watership Down,” died over the weekend, too. (He was 96.)

But losing Fisher and Michael at such early ages really stings.

The tide on Facebook this morning seems to be a collective shaking of fists at 2016.

 

 

A year can’t possibly be “bad,” of course, nor is the number of recent celebrity heads likely outside the statistical norm. But humans love to find patterns and categorize. And, frankly, it really does seem as if the year is walloping everyone, particularly in its waning days. I want 2016 to eat a bunch of Christmas cookies, stretch out in front of Netflix, binge-watch old episodes of “Cheers” and fall asleep until New Year’s Day.

Our own Rory Appleton summed it up thusly:

This story was originally published December 27, 2016 at 1:10 PM with the headline "Dear 2016: In your last few days, can you just mellow out?."