A cold rain fell as I recently stood before my parents’ headstone. My mother died in 2007, my
After the war Dad earned an engineering degree under the GI Bill, married his sweetheart and worked as an industrial designer. He provided a good home for his family and a fine example for his three sons. Only later in life did I realize how fortunate I was to grow up in such an environment.
My parents enjoyed their retirement and did some traveling, but at age 72 Dad was diagnosed with colon cancer. After surgery to cut out the malignancy, he underwent chemotherapy and radiation. In the years that followed he fought off prostate cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer, basal cell carcinoma and a recurrence of the colon cancer. Exhausted, he passed away from noncancerous causes at age 88.
I am now 65 years old and have had several of my own encounters with relatively benign skin