Last Father's Day

Last Father's Day I made sure that I mailed Dad's card early, ensuring that he would receive it before Father's Day.

A week-or-two earlier Dad's doctors telephoned my brother and told him that tests showed a "mass" on either my father's liver or his kidney (I can't remember which) and that Dad was not a good candidate for surgery. They suggested that we contact hospice care for his last few months or weeks.

A hospice nurse met with him. He apparently told her that he was ready to join my mother who had died three years earlier, she was waiting for him; they had been married over seventy years.

On Father's Day I telephoned his assisted living apartment several times, but there was no answer. Maybe he was at lunch in the dining room or at a Father's Day activity. My brother called later and said that Dad was hospitalized. He died three days later.

I don't know if he saw his last Father's Day card.

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According to the note on the back of the above photograph, that is my father "fixing flat on way to Philadelphia - 1946".