Friends,

I wrote this short story this morning for a Medium publication that limits stories to 150 words. Pat died peacefully in his home with the help of a hospice nurse who kept him comfortable. The diagnosis was a shock. He dealt with the ultimate challenge head-on, having learned from our dad’s battle with sinus cancer thirty years ago. If any of you live in the Davenport area, the service will be at Halligan funeral home at 10 am on Saturday, September 20th.

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My youngest brother, Pat, died yesterday at 4 am of liver cancer diagnosed six months ago. He was, according to his oncologist, “the healthiest 70-year-old he had ever treated,” except for the three large tumors. The killer cells likely came from a remaining piece of colon left from a colitis operation thirty years ago.

Pat and Sue, at his home hospice side, would have been married 50 years in 2026. Theirs was a bicentennial wedding, brutally hot, as I recall, on that July day.

I was up at 4 yesterday, as usual. Pat, too, was an early riser. After retiring from Sherwin-Williams, he worked a 2 am to 9 am shift transporting organs between donor and recipient hospitals in southeast Iowa. His age and the stage of his cancer made him an ineligible recipient.

The world has lost a good man, too damned soon.