Like many other Americanos, especially Fox News regulars, I was saddened to hear of the impending death of Charles Krauthammer, an articulate, lively, and often amusing voice on the affairs of the day. The panel on Fox’s evening Special Report is a much blander business without his presence.

Krauthammer announced Friday that the abdominal cancer he had surgery for in August has returned and his doctors have informed him that he likely has but weeks to live.His departure will remove one more name from my list of civilization’s friends.

Krauthammer skillfully pinned the tail on the various donkeys of the Obama enterprise. He called radical Islam what it is. And he could be scathing in taking down the follies, hypocrisies, and manifold scams of the social and political left. (As he put it in the introduction to his very readable Things That Matter,“I never had a Marxist phase.”)

Although Krauthammer was a thorough-going conservative whose learned deconstruction of the left often came with humor that ranged from mischievous to biting, he fell out of favor with some on the right in 2016 because he was insufficiently appreciative of the virtues and prospects of one Donald J. Trump. Although I came to different conclusions on the matter of the Donald, I decline to cast Krauthammer into outer darkness for his. Krauthammer has been way too right about way too many things to be read out in this way.

The letter Krauthammer released Friday sharing his sad news with the public shows that he is eloquent to what, alas, appears to be the very end. I only hope that if I’m ever faced with such a melancholy calendar, I can deal with it with this much courage.

God bless Charles Krauthammer and his family.