When I first began writing about my father’s story, we were gearing up to go to war at my father’s side as he battled the scourge that is cancer. He was diagnosed with Neuroendocrine Carcinoma in May 2019. After a biopsy, many other medical tests, the non-stop around the clock love, care and attention of my sisters and mother and even a second opinion from doctors at another hospital it turned out that there was nothing anyone could do. This particular kind of cancer is especially aggressive, the doctors said. The mass was too large to operate they said. The harm that this cancer had done to my father’s body was so vicious that the doctor’s said they couldn’t fathom how my father was persevering as well as he had. But that was my father. He persevered. The doctors said that this cancer began long ago, it did not just begin in the last couple of months. No one knew. It was happening in his own body and my father didn’t even know, yet he persevered. When the cancer had finally taken too much of a toll on my father’s body and it’s systems, when the doctors could do nothing to stop the unrelenting march of this vile, voracious beast, when each member of his family who was able to be by his side was able to come to a place of reconciliation with my father for their faults, real or imagined, then and only then did my father heed the call of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to come home. My father died on Thursday, June 27, 2019. In the aftermath of this grievous loss my sisters and brothers and I are still trying to find our way to what will never be normal again, but what will have to pass for normal in the absence of the man upon whose shoulders we still stand. While his loss is felt by each of us in our own unique way, the loss is also very much the same for us all. We all love my father. In life, that love has lifted us up, carried us on and brought us closer to one another as another facet of our common bond to one another. In death, that love weighs heavy on our hearts without the man who inspired it standing here with us to share our lives with anymore. That love will never grow cold because we will continue to share it with one another and with our mother. No one feels the loss of my father more so than our mother, his wife. My sisters, brothers and I are still trying to figure out how to be here and offer our best support for our mother. Together, though, we will help each other each step along the way. Now that my father’s battle with cancer has come to its end, for my sisters, my brothers, myself and my mother the battle with the realities of paying for the medical bills and costs incurred while my father endured not one but two hospital stays, travel and lodging hundreds of miles from home and now an unexpected funeral and it’s costs as well, that battle is only just beginning. We are a middle to lower-middle class family. What we lack in material wealth we have always made up for with our love for one another and our love of God. Raising money through crowdfunding is a hope that we have for meeting the financial challenges our family and our mother will be facing as a result of my father’s battle with cancer and his death. If you feel led to donate financially to this cause, please do. My sisters, my brothers, my mother and I would be ever so grateful. We have also created this page on giveinkind.com to serve as a hub to manage other forms of giving that our supporters may like to utilize. Thank you.