[wdfifteen]

It’s been a crazy week and I don’t have a lot of people outside the situation to talk to. You guys are kinda like friends and I have to unload.
My little friend, who called me “grandpa” passed away Friday. He had struggled with cancer for a year so valiantly and with aplomb that few adults could muster. He never complained when he had to carry his 15 pound backpack with its batteries and pumps and drugs and nutrients. He spent the last four months of his life plumbed up with tubes in his nose, mouth, and who knows where else. He accepted his situation with a grace than none of the adults around him were able to maintain for long. I would see him in the most horrible situations, with his radiation helmet on and tubes running out of him and I would want to break down and cry, but he would look at me with a bright smile and hold his arms out for a hug. I hope, if I am ever in such a state, that I can maintain the loving grace that that little boy bestowed on those around him.
I am also pissed – so f**king pissed - at his POS father who should rot in hell, who seldom appeared at the hospital. When Brodie got sick, friends, strangers, family – everyone - stepped up to help the family with money, a house to live in, so much food and so many toys that they had to give it way - but his POS father stepped back. The POS Harley freak's first comment when he heard the little guy had cancer was, “I’m not selling my bike.” He took the family to court to have his child support commitment lowered. Yes, when his family needed him the most he sued them for permission to give then less support. When his family needed him most and everyone else was helping out, he decided he was paying too much. The boy passed away Friday and on Saturday he asked the mother’s family if they would pay him for the hours of work he missed while sitting in the hospital with his dying son. There is a special place in hell for people like this POS.
I was privileged to be there when Brodie made his last efforts at life. I would like to say he passed away peacefully, but he had hoses and tubes running everywhere – he looked like a science experiment – but he took his last breath with the same grace with which he led his life.
After he stopped breathing his mother removed all the tubes and crap and bathed him and held him in her lap and rocked him and for the first time in a year he looked like a normal, sleeping, seven year old boy.
I am the doer in any situation. When there is something to be done I can’t just sit and be like so many people can. (On the other hand, I have found “parade rest” to be a fantastic solution to those situations where there is nothing to be done. Who would have thought parade duty would ever be worth anything?) So I gratefully accepted the task of handling the paperwork.
The family’s choice was to have the cancer tissues excised for research and have the rest of Brodin’s body cremated. I had to transport the papers from the family to the crematorium, and I have to say, my mental images of that sweet little boy, pale as he was in death, lying on his mother’s shoulder, looking for all the world like a normal seven year old – and the thought of that sweet little face being consumed by the fire – it just rips my guts out.
I spend much of my free time with Brodin’s identical twin brother and his older brother, playing and being silly and trying to teach them how to be men. God knows with the father they have they need SOMEONE to teach them what it means to be a man. I'm still finding my with how to talk about Brodin and his death with the other two. I also struggle with the situation with their father. They adore him, and it is so hard not to scream, "Your father is a worthless POS."