Good-bye

I came home last night from six wonderful performances at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival only to be greeted with the news that my dad passed away last night. My mother called the house about ten minutes before I walked in.

I feel numb and can't quite wrap my head around the notion that my dad is gone. He'd been in the hospital since December 30 and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about two weeks ago. We knew that he didn't have much time. All we didn't know was if the cancer would take him, or if it was going to be the pneumonia that had loaded his lungs with fluid, or if his heart, artificially kept pumping by a defibrillator, would finally stop.

My mom told me that he went to sleep after Jeopardy (of course) and when the nurses checked in on him later, he was unresponsive. He went in his sleep, just as I had been hoping would happen. He was 72.