Story highlights Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford died of cancer after a widely publicized struggle with drug and alcohol addiction

Patrick Krill: Why do we empathize with the sufferer of one disease, cancer, while people mocked him for his addiction, which is another disease

Patrick R. Krill is a licensed attorney, board certified alcohol and drug counselor, author and advocate. He is the director of the Legal Professionals Program at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) "Rob Ford fought cancer with courage and determination. My condolences and best wishes to the Ford family today". --Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, via Twitter.

Patrick R. Krill

As is now customary with the passing of public figures, social media exploded with condolences for the family of the late Mayor Rob Ford on Tuesday, making it clear that a man once the subject of merciless ridicule was now being afforded a level of sympathy and kindness unfathomable just a few short years ago.

Across the Internet and media, punchlines have largely been replaced by dignified tributes, and crude caricatures by staid, objective reporting. Why? Because Rob Ford, alive as an alcoholic, was apparently less deserving of compassion and understanding than Rob Ford, now dead from cancer.

True, the fond remembrances and generous consolations are heartening, refreshing expressions of decency towards a family in grieving, and yes, they should be acknowledged and welcomed as such. To be clear, however, they are also the indisputable byproduct of the type of image makeover nobody wants — a cancer diagnosis.

Fueling Ford's trajectory from viciously mocked to politely mourned, his cancer demonstrated how malleable our emotional responses are in light of our moralizations. Rob Ford was, after all, a man who suffered from two life-threatening diseases but garnered sympathy for only one. Perhaps that dichotomy is worth us, as a society, examining.

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