Today would have been Dad's 89th birthday. This photo was taken Christmas Day 2008; Vic, Sophia, and I travelled to Oregon to spend Christmas with my sister and her family. Dad was living with them and bounced back incredibly from a fall earlier that year that landed him in the hospital and in such a bad way that hospice was about to be consulted.
You'd never know how bad things had been because he looked amazing and we had such a great holiday together. He suffered from COPD but his mind was alert thanks in part to his two active grandsons. I can't remember if it was this trip or our earlier trip in February of that year that I took four wheels of slides with me from Rhode Island. My sister rustled up a slide projector and we had a wonderful slide show. I wasn't sure how Dad was going to react, he wasn't really one to look at old photos, said it made him said to see how people used to be but he really enjoyed the show and gave us lots of insight into some of the photos that we taken when we were younger. It's on my list to get the slides converted to photos and scrapbook them.
What a shock it was to get a call from my sister about five weeks later to learn that Dad had fallen asleep the night before and didn't wake up the next morning. He passed the way he had lived, quietly.
Happy Birthday, Dad, we love you and miss you and will raise a glass of Canadian Club in your memory!
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