(Okay, so somewhere in this gray-haired skull of mine is a 16-year-old boy. Sue me.)
As for Fred's situation, it does suck. My father went pretty quickly -- less than a year after a diagnosis of kidney cancer at age 70 back in '97. He was determined to die at home, and needed help only in the last month or so. Still, to see him go from being as big and strong as an ox to a gaunt shadow of himself was painful. It was probably worse for my sister -- she can remember him as a young man in his later 20s back in the '50s. I came along ten years later (1962), so for me he was always middle-aged.
My mother went "harder". She had to go into assisted living at the end of 2003, and then into a nursing home in 2009, and it was a long decline into a "second childhood" by 2016. She finally died of respiratory arrest at age 91 this past February, but in a sense she died a long time ago.
All of this is probably a (somewhat self-centered) way of telling the complainers to back off. Fred is dealing with some serious issues, and Megatokyo, as much as we love it, and are grateful to Fred for producing it, has to take a back seat to what he's doing right now.
I hope he has family who can help with the emotional aspects of the situation, and who maybe live close enough to his parents to take care of some of the physical aspects -- the house-clearing, the bureaucratic paper-chases, etc. -- that are "draining the cup" of Fred and Sarah's joie de vivre.
(Cross-posted from "TTDP 008")
and there'd probably be a lot of fans of that. But that doesn't seem to be the way Fred has rolled so far.
