I shared this sentiment with friends and family members on my Facebook wall in early January after Dad received his preliminary diagnosis of "lung cancer" and after he had allowed himself to feel hope.
At that time, he had made the decision to fight.  He died shortly after.

As I've posted recently, I've had a hard time with my dad's death. I've had a hard time accepting the fact  that the illness of Mesothelioma could be so cruel and take a life so fast.

Seeing this picture on my computer desktop today made me feel sad.  I reflected back to the task of searching for a special saying to share because cancer or not, DAD was going to fight!  He had made that decision.  He felt hope!  I felt hope too and I felt relief.  We could beat this, I could just feel it!  I knew it would be tough and we'd all have to help as we could but we could do it. I was wrong, so seeing this sentiment for the first time in a while, really made me question the word, "hope".

But within minutes of feeling that, I thought of others who were in need of a little hope.  A dear friend has a very sick sister, but her situation is looking up a bit! (Yay!)  I instantly jumped online and posted this to my friend's Facebook page.

Maybe I can't have hope for Dad's illness anymore, but I can use it for many other things and for many other people.  And that's what I'm going to choose to do as I slowly move forward in life.

I'm finding the whole grieving process to be very interesting. I cry a bit everyday, even though it's been over three weeks. Some days it's a few minutes in the morning, some days it stretches throughout the day.

A few days ago, I had an intense moment realizing I couldn't pick up the phone and just call my dad whenever I wanted to. Yesterday, I cried because my son suggested Foster's Freeze for a lunch time outing and it got me right in the gut. Foster's Freeze was one of the local places we frequented with my Dad during his summer month visits. I could go to any Foster's Freeze location other than our location, but I couldn't go to that one. I guess my heart let me know I'm not quite ready for that one yet and that's okay. I'll get there eventually.

Today, my grief is about wanting answers. I want to know if when the doctor told Dad to go home and get healthy for the next four months and then he could set up an appointment to discuss treatment, if there really was hope at that point. Or did the doctor know he probably wouldn't make it through the next four months but tried to give him a bit of hope to be kind. I want to know if the sudden pneumonia is what expedited his death. I want to know if his smoking had anything to do with his death or not. I want to know if he had been a healthy and fit individual, if it would have changed the outcome. The reason why I ask that question is because I've read several things online from other sons and daughters that have shared their shock because their fathers were so healthy and took such good care of themselves, and yet, they too died in a few short months or weeks. Does that mean my dad's unhealthy lifestyle didn't make a difference? Is Mesothelioma that ugly? I'm starting to think that it is.

I heard Tim McGraw's "Life like you were dying" song this morning. The man in the song went skydiving and rocky mountain climbing and lived as much as he could. My dad, however, died within weeks of his diagnosis and didn't get to live at all. I'm angry about that and I'm sad.

Damn you Asbestos, Mesothelioma and the companies that did this to my dad and to so many others.

*** To be continued.

Life is full of moments that change your life forever. My dad died on January 17, 2013, just three weeks after his first visit to the hospital. He should have gone sooner. We all knew it, but he was stubborn and secretive about his health and didn't like to go to doctors. We think he knew (in his heart)  that he had cancer and we think he knew his time was limited. He watched his father die of cancer of the esophagus in 1976 after going through radiation therapy, an eleven hour surgery, and a lot of pain.  He didn't want to go through what he had seen his father go through. And apparently, he didn't want to share any of his thoughts or instincts in regards to his health with anyone close to him (that we are aware of). So he went through quite a long time losing weight and dealing with a great amount of pain.

I knew through my step mom Kathy that something was up, but he wouldn't share with her either and as I mentioned above, he was very secretive about the whole subject. So had Kathy known anything, she would have been sworn to secrecy anyway. I never understood the big secret thing, but that was a part of who he was. Perhaps some of it was to protect us but I think more than that, he had already decided not to go the doctor, and wouldn't have wanted to bug us.

I called him in October 2012 and asked him how he was doing. I was fishing for information and hoping for an opening to encourage him to visit a doctor. I mentioned I had noticed some weight loss and that he hadn't quite seemed "himself" during our visit in August. He didn't share much and turned down my invitation to come for a visit and to have lunch at the local restaurant we both enjoyed. When I asked him why he didn't want to join me, he mentioned he was having an issue with eating. He said that a lot of times when attempting to eat, his food would come back up. He said it was as if the food items wouldn't go all the way down and the only way he could "fix" the issue was to go to the restroom and get it to come back up. For that reason, he thought he'd better not try lunch out at a restaurant. I gave him the suggestion of trying Prilosec in case it was a case of acid reflux. I explained that I knew many people dealing with Acid Reflux (aka "Gerds") and a few of them had it pretty major with issues like he was having. He said he might try some Prilosec to see if that helped. We ended the conversation with me encouraging him to let me know if things got better and he wanted to change his mind about lunch.

* To be continued *