Farewell Dad

What would you give for one more day with one your loved? Death is nearly always looked upon as cruel, yet when it comes to one who has lived a full rich life and struggled toward the end with a progressive degenerative disease, it is release. So came the passing of my father this morning. He had been fighting with the neurological thief of Parkinson’s for nearly a dozen years. The last two years since the passing of my mother and brother have been the most difficult for him.

Parkinson’s patients are afflicted in many different ways. His variety of the disease robbed him of mobility, but more onerous and painful-- the loss of speech. The ideas were there, the few words he was able to utter were testament to his ability to follow what went on around him. His empathy and love for others remained intact. As a great orator in his working life he had been able to convince people of the benefit of what his company offered as well as use the many years after retirement to grow volunteer programs for seniors interacting with school children, hospital education programs and the very personal volunteer work he did at the local emergency room comforting those loved ones of patients in some of their most frightening hours. It was not his infirmity that he mourned, but what he viewed as the added burden it put on those around him. There was always a smile, a squeeze of the hand for anyone who took the time to relate to him. He truly gave so much more than he took.

A Naval flight officer at the age of nineteen, he flew the photographic mission over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to document the effect of the bomb. So secret was the first, no one on this crew knew what they were photographing. First to fly the eye of a hurricane---another photographic documentary mission. In on the inception of the computer as a business tool, he kept a chip in his wallet to remind him of what used to take the space of an entire room. Oral presenter to both U.S and California Supreme courts of the marvelous computer full text retrieval tool of legal research and precedent, he convinced the justices of the power of the future. This was a man on the cutting edge of his time. He found himself in places and circumstances that could have been turned over to others to handle. Not Dad---he took the responsibility to see it through. He rode the wave of tomorrow with a passion for life---its tragedies and triumphs.

Goodnight sweet love. Well done. Rest.