The following blog is written by WEWS Managing Editor Jim Scott sharing his experiences about his father who is dying of cancer.

Jim will provide daily updates.

You may e-mail him your comments.

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June 9, 2008

Dad's a tough old guy. I like to call him a working stiff, a blue collar man with a work ethic second to none. He carried mail for 39 years until a stroke brought him down. That was 23 years ago. He survived the stroke, but Cancer has him these days.

I remember back then being worried about him getting paid for the time off because of the stroke, so imagine my surprise to find out he'd built up so much sick time that it didn’t matter anyway. It was no accident.

Dad always planned for the worst. It seems like he’d never taken a sick day in all of those years.

I later found that he went to work sick lots of times. He told me he did, in fact there was that major blizzard in the early 1950's, that he dug his way out of the house and walked to the Post Office about ten blocks away. I asked why he'd leave mom and me, then a toddler, and risk safety trying to walk in more than two feet of snow.

Surely no mail could be delivered. He said "if you didn't show up in those days, you didn’t get paid, plus if there was a chance that mail could go out, then people wanted their mail." There was no such thing as sick pay for letter carriers back then. He said "Most of those big snow days we didn't deliver any mail, but I got paid for being there."

Now I understand why he often had trouble figuring out why I would take off work for a case of the runs, a bad cough or cold. His generation knew that the job was first, that you got up and went to work on time, no matter what. Actually family "was" first, but because taking care of family required a job, well you get the picture.

My dad never weighed more than 160 pounds, with a medium body frame. No big muscles, but he wasn't skinny either. Today, he is little more than skin and bones.

He's just a bit more under 100 pounds. His face is drawn, but wow that facial structure is all Hollywood! His profound jaw line and deep set eyes could've landed him a part in a movie. When he smiled you'd love him, heck even when he didn't smile you’d love him. He's always looked like the actor Morgan Freeman and now he looks better than that but there's little chance he'll live to see the next Morgan Freeman movie.

It's tough because I've never had to deal with the death of a loved one. For the longest time there was just Mom, Dad and me. Now I have a wife, four children and three grandchildren.

The closest I've come is the death of my mother-in-law who passed away several years ago. She was special to me, and she knew it, but you only know how one truly feels when death or the prospect of it comes knocking.

I just started calling him Pop in the last 10 years. It makes me feel closer to him, as though I needed a reason for that. He has cancer of the lung and liver and also has COPD, a lung disease with no cure. He's gone through nearly a year of chemotherapy and radiation. The doctors had given him a pretty good prognosis, but that quickly disappeared as the days wore on.

I saw the life being sucked out of him. There's no mistake about it chemo and radiation are difficult and for so many people the treatments work. Dad never got sick after or during treatments, but I saw the life leaving his body with every passing week. His spirit was fading too.

He was terribly short of breath and it seemed to be getting worse. The oxygen tank he lugged around gave him only short periods of relief. Even so, he managed to speak, to me, to my mom, he called her "Momma," and he had lots to say to my kids and his great grandkids.

They call him PAP, and when he heard them say his name, it always brought life back to him if only for a short time.

Pop always had pep in his step, but his step was getting slower. Two weeks ago I had to take his car keys away. The short trips to the local store with 'momma' had to stop, at least with him behind the wheel. How incredibly difficult that was. Here I was telling the man who taught me how to drive nearly forty years ago, the guy who handed me the keys to his 65 Chevy Impala, that he couldn’t get behind the wheel anymore. He was okay with it, quietly handing over the keys to his car. His dignity was slowly being taken away.

My mom wasn’t okay with this, but she soon learned he just couldn't do it anymore. He wasn’t the same guy who put me behind the wheel.

As Pop was losing energy he didn’t debate me anymore, not because he'd lost the desire, but because he was losing the strength. The man in this frail body was changing and no matter how hard he tried to beat it, the damn cancer was winning! He actually started calling me by names he used when I was a child. He's been referring to me as "baby" and "my little guy."

I can't hold back the tears when I think that he's loving me even more these days, still I hurt because he can’t debate with me anymore. Oh how I miss it.

Here was this guy with a tenth grade education who was smarter than me and hey I've been to college and to the Marine Corps.

It didn't matter because he was the bigger man, the better man, so I learned from him. He taught me a lot; how to live, how to love, especially how to treat women. I guess a guy who’s been married for almost 60 years got it right.

Pop didn't let the lack of an education get in his way. He was a man with no excuses. He learned things the hard way. He read everything, he got his hands on, newspapers, newsmagazines, periodicals, and all of it from cover to cover. He had a ferocious appetite for news.

He may have lacked a formal education, but doggone it he was smart! He can’t read well any more because his vision is fading.

You should see his reaction to not being able to go through his daily paper, or watch a game on tv. He told me that the news of the day he so loved so much is all a blur, now.

I am broken hearted that I can't do a thing about it. His eldest granddaughter is an Optometrist and she can't help him either.

We'll just keep talking to him holding on to one tiny shred of hope that Pop can whip this thing. I know it's killing me.

See you next time.

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