Member-only story
This Father’s Day, I am missing my own father, as I do on many other days.
My beloved father passed away from bone cancer eight years ago this August. He was sixty-six years old at the time but had been rapidly declining and suffering from a great amount of pain for nearly a year, so it is hard for me to even write or tell people that he lived to sixty-six. On his last birthday, he could not even make it out of his bed and into the party room in the nursing home where he was dying for his birthday party. He had recently been diagnosed at sixty-five, so it was impossible to enjoy that one.
For all intents and purposes, he lived almost sixty-five years before spending one excruciating year dying. But at least we got to visit and converse with him for most of those months, before the final horrible month of August 2012.
It is also one of the reasons that I want to retire as soon as I am eligible, in case I have a similar fate in store. I do not want to work until I am sixty-five if I am only going to make it a year or two or three afterward.
My father’s father passed away just a year or so before he did, just before turning one hundred and one. My mother’s father, who got me started on investing and imparted a great deal of wisdom to me, made it to about ninety-five.
