
Dad was born in Manhattan, 9 November 1941, and grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. He graduated in from Tenafly High School in 1959, then went on to Oklahoma State University, one of the few schools offering a major in computer science at that time. He married my mother Susan Hendricks in early 1962, and I came along that November. He never did finish his degree, but he did eventually find employment in computers way before anybody knew what "information technology" was.
I don't feel any great sadness at his passing. Instead, there is profound relief that his long suffering has ended.
Just before his 70th birthday, Dad had a massive stroke, combined with a heart attack and a case of pneumonia. His sister Sheila Collins Bard found him unconscious, but miraculously alive, in the Cape Cod house they shared on 4.5 acres in Lyme, Connecticut. He was stabilized at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, the same hospital where my son Paxton was born in 1991. L&M then recommended placing him at Bride Brook Health and Rehabilitation Center in the nearby village of Niantic, East Lyme, Connecticut, where he lived for almost four years. Bride Brook gets a five-star rating from just about everybody. I don't have enough stars to bestow on the staff there, working with infirm seniors with every form of dementia imaginable, making Dad's last years bearable.
Of course, I have to work The Earthworm into this post. On my last visit to Bride Brook this summer, I read the first few chapters of my freshly published novel aloud for Dad, and I had to stop because he was laughing so hard that he was in pain. (Your mileage may vary, as they say.) I left an autographed copy in the library there.