u/Due-Marsupial4297

My dad died yesterday after a 13 year battle with 9/11-related cancer. It’s been a lot to process. I was with him and holding his hand when it happened, which I am grateful for. The news spread very quickly throughout our town as my dad was well-liked and knew many many people. The tributes on Facebook have been beautiful but also extremely overwhelming. Today, his story was aired on the local news and ABC news, which is making this all feel so surreal.

Anyway, the wake is on Friday and it will be an open casket viewing. The thought of seeing him again looking relatively like his old self is filling me with so much anxiety, which only gets worse when I realize my children (6 and 9) are going to see him too. I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know how I’m going to be strong for my kids. Does anyone have experience with bringing their children to a funeral?

My dad was diagnosed with a rare cancer 13 years ago (a result of him being part of the recovery and cleanup after 9/11). January 2025, he seemed to start having more issues. More breathing trouble, lungs filling with fluid. It got to the point that by mid July, I was sure he wasn’t going to last the rest of the year. They ended up switching his chemo in August and things started getting better. He wasn’t having any pain from his tumors and his scans showed that the disease stopped progressing.

Fast forward to this year. He started having side effects from an osteoporosis infusion treatment that he had been getting and needed to have a procedure done. It was a non-invasive procedure but his oncologist refused to allow him to go through with it while he was on the chemo. So he took him off the chemo a week leading up to the procedure and then planned to put him back on 2 weeks after. All hell broke loose. He got the procedure and was fine. A week later, he ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and increasing difficulty with breathing. He was in and out of the hospital multiple times for 3 weeks.

This past Monday, he ended up back in the hospital and his decline has been quick. Even on oxygen, he can’t breathe well because he now has SVC syndrome. He’s too weak and frail for them to attempt any sort of treatment other than to hope the chemo creates a miracle. He’s fighting so hard to stay alive but seeing him waste away is torturous. There isn’t a second of every day that has gone by where I’m not worrying that this is it and trying to prepare myself for him to be gone. I know he doesn’t want to go, which makes me feel even worse. He’s only 67 and he doesn’t deserve to suffer this much. I feel completely consumed by grief and I don’t know how I’m going to handle when it’s actually his time.

I’m sorry this is long. My mind is so jumbled and full of fear that I don’t know how to say these things out loud without feeling like I’m going to vomit.