Sad news alert.

I’m not sure if I want to write about this yet; I’m not sure if I even CAN write. I don’t want to be depressing or maudlin or whiny or “choose your adjective here…”

But not even 4 months after my mom died, my dear dad is now suffering the same fate.

Looking back, when I was visiting him 3 weeks ago for Father’s Day, I guess there were signs that it was more than grief that was consuming him – extreme weight loss, fatigue, mild confusion, lack of appetite, and the real telling clues – his admission that his palate was changing and the few foods that he could tolerate no longer appealed to him.  (This was one of the alarm bell symptoms in my mom). But given the magnitude of the devastation of losing one’s spouse, confidante and life-long friend, we all thought, including my dad, that perhaps in his case the effects of grief were correspondingly extreme.

And we all wondered though why things were getting worse not better. Even the worst grief abates, however minimally, with time.

Well, that mystery my friends is now solved.

My father  is now in hospital, with cancer. It has spread to his brain (or maybe it originated there). We find out early next week. Radiation may be an option for the brain lesions.  Because he’s too weak to move around, he is not a candidate for chemo at this time.

In any event the prognosis is not good.  Any treatment will be of a palliative nature – to buy him a bit more time, to give him some quality of life. There is not going to be a cure or remission.

With aging parents, their departure from this world is always very close to the surface of your thoughts – the clichéd “late night phone call” etc. etc.  However this current scenario was definitely not among any of the scenarios that played in my mind when I thought about the world with out my dad.

I never contemplated both my parents dying so close together.  But then that’s how they were in life – always together.