Farewell to Pop

It was a year ago that I was posting on here about how my grandmother was unwell and she passed away on Jan.13. Sometimes it feels like it was much longer away than that, sometimes it just feels like it was yesterday. Maybe that is because it was yesterday that her husband, Frank, and my Pop, passed away in his home.

He has been unwell for a while, mostly due to complications from diabetes and poor heart health, and had been recently saying that he "just wanted to die." He had been an in increasing amount of discomfort lately and on Christmas my dad's siblings decided to give him the morphine pack of pills that came with his hospice kit to ease his pain. He has been on hospice care for about a year, and that is why he died at home.

We all went there yesterday to say goodbye; the hospice nurse and the funeral home came out to pronounce and take him away. The funeral will be on Saturday, 11 a.m. at MDP with a viewing prior. We spent the day yesterday looking through photo albums to make collages for the church like we did prior to Gram's funeral.

I can't tell you a lot of specifics about his life (and it's a shame but I should know more specifics about my family's life) but if I had to pick a big characteristic, it is that he was a hard worker. He kept himself always busy with the house(es) and the yard, working for a living and even after retirement. I think that was why he was so unhappy in the past few years - he was just not able to do anything he enjoyed, or keep his hands busy. He had big hands with big knuckles. The last time I saw him, he had an incredibly strong grip for a guy ready to let go of life. He was in the Navy. He was a photographer, and there are a ton of pictures of the kids in albums. There are not so many of him, because he was on the other side of the camera. He was a runner. He loved my grandmother so much and was telling us a lot recently that he had seen her or she was downstairs. He LOVED ice cream and anything sweet, which is such a curse for a diabetic. We would joke that at the Ponderosa buffet he would just put his head under the soft-serve ice cream machine and turn it on. He was very handsome and always dressed nicely; even yesterday, we were saying that he still had a really nice head of white hair.

Please say some prayers for the peaceful repose of his soul and for my family.