If only there really was a disturbance in the Force whenever a friend or acquaintance died, it would save someone like me a lot of after-the-fact sadness.

To have the kind of intuition that immediately detects rips in the great chain of being that links us all, you either have to exist in the "Star Wars" universe -- or read the obits more regularly than I do.

As bad luck would have it, I learned of the passing of my friend Ralph Jerome Young -- a retired Pittsburgh homicide detective, FBI agent and SWAT team leader -- from a mutual friend who also happens to be a cop.

My friend was still down in the dumps about Ralph's death weeks earlier. When he finally told me that the cop he was mourning was the same Ralph Young I knew, I was stunned.

No wonder I hadn't seen him at the Edgewood Giant Eagle in a while. Ralph was such a regular fixture at the meat counter, where he used to jaw and joke with a meat cutter there that he's known for decades, I always took his presence for granted. It didn't occur to me how odd it was that I hadn't seen him for over a month.

Because I had no idea Ralph had died, I missed the tributes and the funeral. Wracking my brain, I tried to remember the last time I saw him sauntering through Giant Eagle pushing a big shopping cart with only a few items in it and chomping down on a stubby cigar like Columbo.

If Dennis Franz, the actor who played Detective Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue," had been black, he could have played Ralph in a movie about his life in his later years.

At 68, Ralph was one of those black men who had what folks of his generation used to call "good hair." He wore a wool cap at all times, even in hot weather, but you could still see traces of his once long, flowing black hair curling in the back of his neck.

Ralph had a big laugh and an irreverent sense of humor. To see him shuffling around Giant Eagle with his mad squint and mischievous grin, you would hardly have believed he was someone who used to chase crooks and scoundrels for a living.

After a three-year stint in the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg in the early 1960s, Ralph earned a degree from the University of Pittsburgh and joined the Pittsburgh police in 1967.

As a homicide detective, Ralph looked forward to matching wits with clever criminals because he enjoyed amassing the evidence that would put them away.

He was more Columbo than Jack Bauer by the time he graduated from the FBI academy in 1975. He was the first black FBI field agent in the Jackson, Miss., office -- an honor that still amused him decades later. He was eventually sent to the D.C. office before he was transferred to Pittsburgh in the late 1970s.

During his FBI career, he worked the notorious Atlanta Child Murder detail, helping in the search for the serial killer. He also went deep undercover to infiltrate a black Cleveland-based bank robbery ring. He spent an hour explaining the details to me one afternoon at the Giant Eagle meat counter. I confess at the time it sounded more like a movie than most movies do, but I believed him. He always suppressed his Cheshire cat grin when he was telling the truth.

In the mid-1990s after he retired from the FBI, Ralph opened his own private detective agency. I never had the guts to ask him if he got a lot of business. After all, he was once known on the East End as a weight-lifting, cigar-chomping mystery man who thundered around the neighborhood on a Harley-Davidson.

Despite his distaste for most politicians (and especially Republicans), Ralph was one of the most patriotic people around. He was definitely more conservative than he let on. He agreed with my stances on civil liberties, but he thought I was something of a wimp when it came to guns. Ralph was a big fan of guns. He had even been a SWAT team leader in the FBI.

According to reporter Torsten Ove, who wrote his obituary in the Post-Gazette, Ralph died of heart failure on the shooting range on June 12. He was dutifully cleaning his gun when his "number got punched," as the old folks used to say.

Knowing Ralph, he probably started laughing after the initial shock of his heart giving out. He was going out the way he always wanted to go. I don't know if he was chomping on a cigar at the time, but it wouldn't shock me.

I already miss Ralph's playful lectures and his snappy repartee with James the meat cutter. We didn't always agree, but our talks were always enlightening and funny. Rest in peace, Ralph J. Young. You earned the sleep of the just a long time ago.