Dave Landers

Sometimes life comes at you all at once. My last week has been like that. Not enough time between events (good and bad) to really process everything.

Late last week, I learned that my good friend dIon in Australia was not doing well. He had been fighting melanoma since May, and the cancer was now definitely winning. We heard that dIon was still fighting and still spewing his usual humor and sarcasm.

Somehow, I was able to set that somewhat aside and get on with my weekend. I helped cook for a 110 people at one of our Order of the Arrow (Boy Scout) service weekends. The guys were fixing up our Cub Scout camp while we cooked for them. We did dinner in 20 Dutch Ovens (plus 6 for the cakes). It was a lot of fun and a big success. Pictures will follow.

After getting back home on Sunday, I took a well-needed nap and avoided the computer because I just couldn’t bring myself to open my email.

Sunday night, we had to call 911 for my Father in Law (my in-laws live next door to us). He had been living with Parkinson’s disease for something like 15 years. We spent basically all night in the ER… he was not expected to live out the day.

This same week last year we were with my Mother in Law in the ICU. She has made an amazing recovery this year, thankfully.

Monday morning, I checked my email (the hospital has wireless everywhere), and discovered dIon was still hanging in there, and was enjoying being read letters from his friends. I was able to choke out a final letter while sitting in the family room down the hall.

My Father in Law passed away peacefully on Tuesday. David Camp was a Presbyterian minister, an Army Chaplain (Korea and Viet Nam), a devoted Kiwanian, and among many other endeavors he was pretty decent at stained glass art. It was frustrating for him to have Parkinson’s take each of these things away, one by one, but he handled it with grace. The family has not quite got our heads around this yet, but on the whole we know he is in a better place and no longer limited by this stupid disease.

On Wednesday, I learned that dIon also passed away. Due to the oddities of time zones around a spinning globe, he actually passed on Thursday. Typical of dIon to mess with my head like that. He was an amazing fellow: a businessman, a technologist, a gifted software developer, a wonderfully artistic photographer, a very funny guy, and it was my privilege to call him my friend.

I’m not whining about any of this. Life hands us the bad and the good. But it sure would have been nice to be able to process each of these one at a time.