Life is...so fucking fragile, sometimes.
Hello Friends and Family, Coworkers and Acquaintances: My mother lost her husband of 29 years (partner for 36 years) on May 28, 2026 after
At the end of May this year, I lost my dad (he was technically my stepdad, but, he's been in my life since I was 3. the man was my dad).
He battled through hell when I was in my late teens/early twenties, overcame addictions that people knew about but didn't talk about. He got better. He did better. We went from struggling, worrying about if we'd be able to afford rent, gas, groceries, literally putting $1 in the tank just to make it to tomorrow, minor jobs that fed the habit more than the rest of us, to being clean of everything, a corporate job that kept us housed, comfortable, and ahead on bills by at least a couple of months.
And then...and then 2026 destroyed it. The year started off on the wrong foot - had to buy a new fridge, had to deal with mice, had to deal with a broken dishwasher, had to deal with a broken fence - and then just dove right off the cliff. In April, he started to get sick. Pain in his lower side (he didn't have an appendix, so that wasn't a concern). Nausea. Struggled to keep food down. And then it started getting worse. Fever. Worsening pain. Couldn't eat anything without it coming back up. Mid May we got the scan - there was something on his pancreas. A week later, we got the confirmation - metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. It was in his liver, and looked to be in his lungs, too. Two hospital stays (4 days in the hospital, 2 days home, 3 days back in the hospital) as he deteriorated so quickly, before he went to hospice. May 28, he was gone. Blink of an eye, our entire lives changed.
He was married to my mother for 29 years - they had just passed their anniversary, 4 days before he died, and he was already so far gone, I don't even know if he knew. He was 1 month shy of his 60th birthday. He had battled past addiction, dealt with early onset COPD, and congestive heart failure, only for this to be how he was taken away from us.
And almost immediately, we learned one very shitty, shitty thing: the man who dragged himself through addiction to come out clean on the other side, to make sure we never, ever worried about whether or not the bills were paid, whether we could afford rent, groceries, utilities, he had somehow overlooked life insurance.
My sister set up a donation page, for my mother and I, to try and bridge some of the gap. The medical bills are coming, some have already come in. The car he was so proud of, he only had it in his name. It's our only mode of transportation. And it still has a loan on it. We have to stay in our house until the lease is up (I read the stupid thing, you can't get out of it for a damn thing), in February.
It's such a shitty spot to stand in, knowing so many things need to be done and handled and not really knowing yet what all of those things are or what they are going to entail. We are trying to find our footing, but the fact that he had absolutely no life insurance - not even one of those complementary ones that sometimes come with credit union accounts - has us at a bit of a loss.
It feels weird to ask for help. I haven't been one to ask for help much, at least not in the last few years. And this is far beyond anything I've ever had to deal with. Grief is weird. Early grief is weird. It leaves you feeling cracked and untethered and lost, and sometimes all while knowing you don't get to feel that way because you have to take care of things. The world doesn't stop. How un-fucking-fair that the world doesn't stop.
My dad was a great guy. He wasn't perfect, but no one is perfect. But he learned from his mistakes. He grew into a better person. He was smart, he loved to learn things he didn't know, he listened, he was funny and he was Safe. He was a safe place, he was the person you could call at 3am when something felt wrong, and he'd either talk you down, or be there to get you in less time that it should have taken. He remembered your favorite foods, he listened to what you wanted, he made sure every single dog we'd ever had was absolutely spoiled rotten, and always well taken care of. He loved music, and grilling out, and he encouraged every single little hobby I had even if it didn't last, and he was my biggest cheerleader when I started to cook and bake. Every recipe he saw that he liked, he sent me, "I think you could make this!" every single time, and he was right - I always said I could do anything, and he was the reason I felt like I could a lot of the time. There is a massive hole in our lives.
If you can help, even just a little bit, that would be wonderful. If you can share this, for others that might be able to help instead, that would be great, as well.
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