Old times

How many of us have jobs we love? Jobs that we wake up for and go to with joy? Jobs that may pay little but reward us more than anything we do in our free time?
I had such a job in the late 1990s. I was a reporter for a suburban Philadelphia weekly newspaper, and most of what made the job I had that kind of job was my editor.

"Is he nice?" my mother asked about him. Well, no. No, he wasn't "nice." But if he were he wouldn't have been good at what he did and what I wrote would've been closer to PR copy than to journalism. So fuck nice. He—his name was Dan—was an experienced who'd been out of the field for a bit so was working for a paper he was overqualified for. 
My first eight months of doing real journalism were months in which I learned more than I did while getting a master's degree in it. I also learned that the anxiety of writing for publication is the kind that makes you lose sleep and that somehow I could function for months at a time getting no more than four hours of sleep a day, total, on a good day. Usually closer to three. 
Dan died last month at age seventy-one. We'd kept in touch by email over the last nineteen years but if he had a list of people for his survivors to inform of his death I wasn't on it. (I have such a list held onto my refrigerator with a magnet.) 
How do such people die without generating a wave of some kind that alerts us to their deaths?