He passed away today. I was sorry that I was not able to be there, but am glad that I saw him at Christmastime, and he was well and happy. He was my last living Grandparent.
I talked with him on the phone over the last couple of months. He told me that he received DOZENS of greeting cards for his birthday—more than he'd ever received before—and he displayed them all over his kitchen.
He told me that there were too many for the counter top, so they spilled onto the windowsills and the table. Every time I've talked with him, he has mentioned how happy it made him to have such a visible reminder of just how many people love him. He talked about how lucky he is to have such caring family and friends.
It was a nice reminder that the work I've been doing for the last 16 years really does make a difference in peoples' lives. I have to thank all my coworkers, and my own family, for being such caring people. :)
I've been reflecting... all four of my Grandparents had cancer (breast, bone, lung—from smoking, and... I forget what my other Grandfather had. He's been gone a long time). I've heard scientists and doctors on NPR say that having a family history is no death sentence: we all have a lot of control based on diet and exercise. And now that the entire human DNA sequence can be decoded, we know that cancer occurs due to abnormalities in the DNA sequence, and everyone has these—it just doesn't get "flipped on" in everyone. So I'm going to continue to do my best to be as healthy as possible, and write my own ending to my life story.
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