Dear Friends, I regret to inform you that my beloved son, father, grandfather, passed away at 10:40 am on Friday, only hours after he was removed from life support. Organ failure quickly followed hypoxia from the cardiac arrest he suffered on Sunday morning, and he never regained consciousness.

We are devastated even though it was expected, and are scrambling to find a way to bury him (he did not want cremation even though he also didn’t want to be kept alive on a “machine”) because he had no insurance and few resources. We are trying to find some local funding for a burial as well as trying to pool resources for a burial plot, both expensive, and had almost come to a consensus of cremation as a last resort (which we could afford), but his son wants to continue looking for a way to bury him, since it was my son’s wish.

My son was a kind and generous person, to a fault, and sometimes to his own detriment, but he loved people and he was loved in return. We will miss him so much, but he lived his life as he wanted and I expect that is what we all think we do, in the end, for better or worse. Unfortunately, he didn’t care about having a lot of money for himself and was impractical in that respect, but we will find a way to honor his last wish, although it might not be possible in the end.

We have also heard from relatives we haven’t seen in many years (through a FB posting on my granddaughter’s page) and I’m still sorting that out. Worst of all, when I called his father in WA state to inform him of his hospitalization, his father wasn’t even interested. Not surprising, since he showed no interest in him during his entire life—a total failure of character on his father’s part, for which his son forgave him, but which I never have because it did affect my son tremendously. All in all, this is a sad, but busy, as well as confusing and frustrating, time for us.

Nevertheless, I wanted to get this to message to you and to thank you for all your kind thoughts in our time of grief.