Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

A few of you out there may be familiar with my occasional posts about Bob Church.  He is the father of my girlfriend (and of course, wife to be) Kristin Church.  Bob has been fighting cancer for a long time, having begun chemotherapy a couple of months before his grand birthday party back in September.  Friends and family from all over the country, some who had never flown on an airplane before in their whole life, came all the way out to Moberly, Missouri to see Bob in person and celebrate his 61st birthday with him.  I took some photos and a good chunk of priceless video while I was out there and I’d love it if you’d take some time to download it all and enjoy some of the memories everybody took away from the party.  You’ll find two files for downloading located here.

Bob is a skilled writer of tall tales, short stories and beautiful poems.  I was honored and saddened to have helped him post his very last update to his blog yesterday, announcing that he has no further intentions of adding anything further to his collection of over 320+ writings that have accumulated there since 2006.  Even with the absence of fresh material he continues to gain new fans and inspire fellow poets who hope to one day write with the same kind of colorful essence and flow he’s demonstrated.

The decision to end chemotherapy came yesterday, partially from the doctors who have been working with Bob, and partially from Bob himself.  The cold truth of the matter is that these treatments are wretched in their induction of unbearable sickness, and the doctors feel at this point that continuing treatment of this kind would only do more harm than good.  They both feel that these final days should be spent with him in as best condition he can possibly be instead of sickened to the core and unable to visit with family and friends.  Regular secondary medications have kept the physical pain and anxiety he’s endured suppressed to a more tolerable level.  Unfortunately the medication he takes does little to suppress the same symptoms endured by all of us around him, and things are quite depressing right now.

So the plan is to make the best of things and try hard to not let our emotions rob what little time is left.  We’re planing on watching Wall-E today, a film I love so much that I watched it 4 times in the theaters when it was first released.  Being bed bound in the living room, one of the best things we can do with him is watch movies as a family, and a few other unique titles are down the line.  I’ll write more some other time about a movie Bob and I first had a very excited discussion about when we met for the very first time in person at an Olive Garden in Columbia, Missouri.  And I’m going to host it on my server for others to download without hassle as a dedication to him.  Speaking of Columbia, Kristin and I will be going there tomorrow night to see Nine Inch Nails in concert in an arena that is across the street from the VA hospital Bob’s chemotherapy treatments started at earlier this year…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Bob Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.