But again, this isn’t new. I was a fan of Lance Cade and Umaga and Ashley Massaro. I was a fan of Test and Larry Sweeney and Shad Gaspard. I was a huge fan of Lee. This feels worse than those deaths, somehow. This cuts deeper, more along the lines of the pain I felt when Eddie Guerrero died. Is it simply a matter of stature? A bigger name, a more beloved star, a stronger impact? That feels wrong. That’s not the reason. Or at least, it’s not the entire reason. It’s just one facet, one aspect of the true source of the pain, just one color of black among many.

This is the truth: It’s not just that I, as a fan, lost Bray Wyatt. It’s that wrestling lost Bray Wyatt.

That was part of what hit me hard about Eddie — he was one of the all-time greats, and he had more greatness to give, and wrestling lost that. Obviously any wrestler who dies young is robbing the industry of their potential greatness, but with Eddie, it wasn’t just potential. It was real, we’d seen it; it was past, not future. That’s where the stature comes in. It’s worse, somehow, when you say to yourself, “I have seen this person achieve greatness; I will never see them achieve greatness again.”

Even then, though, this is different. Eddie Guerrero was great in a very specific, very traditional sense, i.e. he was great in the ring. What we lost when he died, what wrestling lost, was the potential for more incredible wrestling matches of the kind he had already spent his career performing. To be sure, he was great on the mic, too, and his character work was exceptional, but he was very much a professional wrestler in the manner of any other professional wrestler. He was among the very best at executing that model, but he wasn’t in the business of breaking it.