Celebrating my Father's Life

As I sit at my father's bedside, managing the increasing heaviness of his breathing, I'm doing my best to keep his lips moist, his extremities warm, and the dosing of his comfort care medications appropriate so there is no air hunger.People from my parents' past are calling and emailing me, telling me their stories and reveling in the impact my father had on their lives.  They've told me:He inspired them to go into engineering (he's a patent lawyer trained as an engineer)He inspired them with his kindness and gentlenessHis tenacity living with multiple sclerosis for 23+ years inspired them to approach their own illnesses with vigorSome of the stories people remember:When I was 13 in 1975, my father got me my first summer job, working at defense contractor TRW.   I developed satellite telemetry parsing software in Fortran, working in the same building as Chris Boyce (the Falcon and the Snowman) .  My father's effort to give me powerful computer resources in the 1970's changed the course of my life.One of my father's friends recalls the joy my father felt when he and I built electronics projects together throughout the 1970's  - a metal detector, early analog signal processing experiments such as voice synthesizers, and an Altair 8800I have many special memories of life with my father, many of them forever preserved on Kodachrome:My father was in the Air Force from 1963 to 1968, so we traveled extensively. One of my earliest memories was playing on a Oahu be...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs