Poignance used in a sentence

Poignance in a sentence as a noun

Aaron Swartz's ******* coincided with one of the worst downtimes of my own life so the tragedy of his death has always had special poignance for me.

Java only recently got better, I think partially in response to pressure from .NET. Nowadays, though, even C++ is a wildly different beast, so the point the article was trying to make has lost a lot of its poignance.