by Joseph Whalen

Created on: February 18, 2010

There is nothing more certain or more guaranteed in life than death.  It happens to all of us eventually.  It’s a part of human nature and is impossible for any of us to avoid and ultimately is beyond our control.  Sure through modern medical technology we can prolong life, in some rare cases we can even bring people back from the brink of death.  But in the end we have to face up to the fact that we all die some day.  The only control we have over the situation is how we choose to face death and how we live the life we have for the limited time we have it.

Having been diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer in the fall of nineteen ninety one my father was immediately resigned to the fact that he was going to die.  He was relatively young, only in his mid-fifties at the time of the diagnosis so for the rest of the family there was a profound sense of fear and disappointment at the fact that he would be taken from us at so young an age.  It was perhaps more difficult for the rest of us to accept than for my father and I always found that puzzling.

My father was a fighter, on many levels.  No professionally of course, but he had seen his share of fist fights and arguments.  To this day I’m convinced that much of the pleasure he took from his marriage to my mother was the fights they would get into and ultimately get over.  Late in the marriage it seemed that was all they had left between them at times, and I think secretly both of them held on to that last show of passion either of them held for each other.  So to see him resign himself to his fate after the diagnosis and show almost no willingness to fight it was disappointing for young man of seventeen who still naively looked at his father as a role model.

Always distant and emotionally detached I never really had much of a relationship with my father, certainly not the type of father and son relationship that people look back on fondly.  While my father had his reasons for not wanting to get too close to me and my three brothers you could always see the desire to do so.  As a result I never got to spend much time with my father and consequently never really got to know him very well nor him me. He was my dad, strong and defiant, always stubborn and obstinate and often abrasive.  While he didn’t say it or show it very often he loved all of us, that much was certain.  For all his flaws, and he had many of them, he was

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