"Al" Died from Brain Cancer

On July 4, I wrote a post on reasons in our lives for sadness and discouragement.

One reason was our long-time friend I called Al had an aggressive form of brain cancer.

He'd just had surgery which was really to create more room for the tumor to grow before it ate away vital parts of his brain.

He chose not to have radiation and chemotherapy treatments and was told he probably had about six months.

He died two days ago.

I described Al as being aggressively anti-Christian. Our friendship spanned nearly 40 years.

It was a challenging relationship. We are as vigorous in our devotion to Jesus as Al was convinced that the church...he was raised Catholic and knew church much more than Jesus...was useless, if not outright evil. Al was very religious in his own way and was an active Unitarian Universalist.

In the end, we fought our spiritual battle to a draw.

While we agreed with much of what Al believed about organized and institutional Christianity, we could never get him to think of Jesus as more than a great prophet or teacher.

There were no last minute opportunities.

His mind went quickly.

We met weekly for many years and almost to the end and I recall hearing him speaking intelligently one week about a book we'd both read. The next week he could only mumble brief, meaningless phrases. Shortly after that, the tumor was discovered.

His wife told us that her greatest sadness is that his mind went so quickly that she didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

So sad.