It Happened This Morning, an Hour Before Sunrise

January 8th, 2021:

My father has died. It happened this morning, an hour before sunrise.

Last Saturday, January 2nd, Dad went to the hospital with symptoms in line with a mild-to-moderate stroke. At first, we believed the great distress he’d felt at the passing of his sister — our beloved Aunt — a few days prior might have provoked it. But a CAT scan didn’t reveal signs of stroke.

Instead, they discovered cancer throughout his body. In his kidneys and spleen, in his lungs, and a trio of tumors in his brain.

The tumors in his brain were causing the stroke-like symptoms. Within a couple days, Dad’s physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly. He lost the ability to walk and began displaying behaviors akin to dementia, which became severe. On the third day, the doctors confirmed after many tests that no options existed to save him. During this entire time, we couldn’t see him in person because of the pandemic and hospital lockdowns. We called him in the ICU, but as he lost clarity of thought, those quick calls soon became more heartbreaking than helpful.

The doctors gave Dad two weeks to a couple months to live on Wednesday, and they transferred him to a hospice care facility yesterday, on Thursday afternoon. By that point, his physical condition had collapsed, and he was comatose. And today he passed away.

We are devastated.

I will be silent here for a week or more to focus on my family and privately work through my grief. We lost my mom in 2012, and with Dad’s passing their generation of our family now lives only in memory.

But I will return. Writers write. And I’ll keep writing because stories are all we are.

In the end.

Bless you all.

~Jason H. Abbott