A friend of my family’s, Claude “Dad” Ward, who worked with my father for many years, died this week. He was a good man, and he’ll be missed.
He wasn’t my father, but everybody who knew him called him “Dad.” I don’t think I even heard his given name for the first ten or fifteen years that I knew him.
He had battled myasthenia gravis for years, but what finally got him was weird—tuberculosis from a spider bite. After Daddy told me that, I thought he must have misheard something, so I Googled it—and yep, there are other cases of that happening.
I’ll think of him every time I see an Airedale or a raccoon 🙂