Death

I have been dealing with the death of my father in law.  Vern is a great man.  Wisconsin, Catholic farm boy, 2nd oldest of (I think) 14.  He is a man with such patience and temperance.  He has cancer. It's bad.  Even if there was any hope of a cure, which there isn't, he made the decision to forgo the chemo and radiation route.  Vern is withering away.

He is skeletal and becoming more and more unresponsive.  The skeletonization has taken place in the last two weeks.  The unresponsiveness is new today.  He will die, likely this weekend.

I will miss him.

Tonight, I was getting ready to leave and my youngest daughter went up and sat next to him and put her tiny hand on top of his.  Ever since, I've been having a hard time not crying.

It feels like we live in a country that can do anything, yet, for some reason, we don't.  We wanted to cure polio, and we made it happen.  We wanted to tear up an incredible amount of the United States and build an interstate road system, and we did that.  We wanted to send human beings to the moon and we figured out a way to do that.

Cancer has been killing people for years.  It's not fair to loop cancer into one category as there are some seriously nefarious kids of cancer, far more toxic.  In a country which spends copious amounts of money researching potato chip flavorings and erection pills, why haven't we found a cure yet?