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| Morton G. Kimmel, 1934-2015 |
After eleven days in hospice, my dad left us early Wednesday morning. I spent the wee hours sitting with him -- we knew it would be soon. I had left his side to make my bed, and as I returned the quilt to the closet, I stopped to review the suit and tie that had been selected for his funeral. I was not happy with the tie, and was going through his tie selection when a family member came to tell me he was gone.
Dad had long battled Parkinson's disease, and in 2013 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of bone cancer. If he endured limitations and discomfort in his old age, he did it with grace and dignity. Dad, may you rest in peace.
I could not describe my dad in a way that would do him justice. Instead I will share something I read recently about the significance of the individual, and about a generation that we are losing.
Oliver Sacks, noted author, wrote an article for the New York Times on learning that he has terminal cancer.
"I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."
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