It is sad to hear when people close to us are suffering from serious diseases, but the feeling doesn’t go away when death claims the lives of people who we usually listen, watch, follow their example or simply admire. Leroy Sievers was one of them. Unfortunately, he lost the battle with life on Friday at his home in Maryland at the age of 53. He died of cancer, a disease that he had been fighting with for years, the National Public Radio announced in a statement.

Sievers was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2001. In 2005, the disease returned in the form of a brain tumor and lung tumor and in 2006 in his spine. After enduring a series of painful treatments and surgeries, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and radiofrequency, he decided to give up his fight with cancer saying, ironically, “My doctors are trying to kill me.”

Sievers wanted to share his experience with cancer and his grief with millions of listeners of the National Public Radio. Moreover, he began the “My Cancer” blog, which became one of NPR’s best-known features. This way, he stayed in touch with his listeners, becoming “one of them.”

The National Public Radio wasn’t the only place Sievers enriched with his work. He was also a great journalist for more than 25 years, including 10 at CBS News and 14 years at ABC News’ “Nightline.” He covered more than a dozen wars, being embedded with Ted Koppel to cover the Iraq war and produce “The Fallen” telling the world the story of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He won no less than 12 national Emmys, two George Foster Peabody Awards and two Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Awards. He always liked to stay in touch with people and for this reason he volunteered with the Red Cross and traveled to Africa for Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

“Cancer was not in Leroy’s plans. But he turned his battle with cancer into the most dramatic, the most moving and the most important story of his life. Larger than life while he walked among us, and destined to be even larger in our memories,” were the words of his colleague and friend Koppel.