A haunting, beautiful, sad tale

From The Los Angeles Times today: Texas teen dies on Christmas, leaves online message Ben Breedlove died on Christmas, leaving behind a wordless, two-part YouTube video message about chronic illness, death and the afterlife viewed more than 450,000 times as of Wednesday. In the first part of the video, posted Dec. 18, the teen starts out smiling, brown hair neatly parted, staring into the camera and holding up the first card, written in blue marker. The only sound is instrumental music playing in the background, Gary Jules' "Mad World." I'll leave the rest to him: