It may well have been part of the divorce settlement that he pay for college. That means nothing. If they feel he destroyed their family because of his inability to keep it in his pants, they may not care if he dies. Leave it alone.
StG
You are saying he has a 70% chance of recovery? Do not contact the children. The daughter didn’t respond to the first contact, therefore indicating her desire to not interact with her father. If he were terminal and on his deathbed, my answer might be different. You don’t need to get involved.
You are only getting one side of the story. The side that makes him look like he’s made a few “human” mistakes, but nothing too bad.
But you don’t know if this is the case.
I’d say give the kids around 2 months before his expected day to die.
They really do deserve to know, in that case.
And like I said before, often this sort of thing can be best handled by a neutral 3rd party. It keeps emotions from running high.
What a lot of you are forgetting is that LAWYERS will be contacting these children if he dies. There is no “3rd parties have no business getting involved”. Contact will occur, if the man passes. That’s just reality. This isn’t a situation where emotion can change basic facts.
Why do you do that…period thing? What does it denote? What does it mean? Why?
When I read it, it makes me think there’s a punchline, but there’s not.
Very serious question, why do you do it?
That’s what they’re paid for. The OP has no business getting involved in another family’s drama.
I might have felt differently 5 years ago. However, after I spent a couple of years working for a major bank in their mortgage division, I am firmly on the other side.
Every few weeks I would get a call from some child of a recently-deceased parent. Invariably the parent died intestate, and/or there was some dispute over the ownership of the house, etc., etc., etc.. The net effect was a bureaucratic nightmare involving the bank, lawyers, the courts, etc. This usually goes on for 6 months minimum, sometimes up to two years.
It’s way cheaper to get everything settled and 100% clear with the funeral and the estate prior to death. Emotions be damned, a messy estate situation is just no fun at all. It saps your will, costs thousands of dollars, and makes people really desperate to just “be done with it”.
If the man in question really cares about his children, he’ll short sell, do a deed in lieu of foreclosure, or allow foreclosure on the house. That way there’s no real estate to complicate the situation.
I’m going against the grain here. If I were you, I’d go ahead and tell the kids something like “Hey, what you do with this info is up to you, but I wanted to let you know that your father was recently diagnosed with cancer.”
It’s possible that they are so estranged from him that they won’t care about this news. It’s also possible that the news will put things into perspective for them and they will want to try to clear the air in case the dad dies.
For all we know, maybe he was an abuser or something and they have good reason for wanting nothing to do with him ever again. However, there are also a lot of cases out there of people who are estranged for really stupid reasons that stopped mattering a long time ago, and it’s just that nobody has been willing to make the move to reach out and say sorry. If it is the latter sort of situation, I think it’d be very sad if they lost their chance to put the BS aside without even realizing it. I wasn’t estranged from my parents, but I still have things that I wish I had said/done before they died. It’s really hard to move past that when you know you’re never going to get the chance to talk to the person about the situation.
If you don’t end up contacting the kids, it might not be a bad idea to ask him if he’d like to write a letter with the plan they can read it after he dies if they want to.
Indeed.
They’re not periods, they’re ellipsis. I’m assuming the OP is using them to indicate “a pause” (see definition 2); she’s trying to reproduce her speech patterns in writing. Most people would use other kinds of punctuation marks when writing in English, but she’s not the first case I’ve met (or the first one I’ve met here) who puts an ellipsis in any point where they had to think of the right word or where there is any kind of pause in speech.
This is why I’d save the panda.
Stay out of it. Telling his family on his behalf is probably going to result in more hurt feelings because it raises the question of why he couldn’t make the effort to tell them himself. It doesn’t make it easier and doesn’t make him look good.
FYI - Facebook filters messages from strangers into a separate mail folder that most people don’t know exists. Chances are high that she never saw your first note.
correct…i was a huge fan of Paul Harvey’s twice daily weekly broadcasts, as well as the weekend “rest of the story”…he deployed ellipses in every speech, to give the observer time to dwell on a point just made…very effective.
Incorrect, however, when you say “she”…I am male…Cougar is my pen name, because my first car was a Cougar, and the movie “Top Gun” …where Tom Cruise played F14 TomCat pilot “Cougar”, was one of my fav’s when it came out. The first movie to include awesome, realistic inside and outside views, of modern jet fighters, in aerial combat. My dad flew in WW2, still alive…wanted to likewise, but my vision wasn’t within spec’s..so I settled for taking Cessna single engine, prop lessons…as well as Paraplanes (3 wheeled aircraft, with a huge rectangular chute, and huge air boat type propeller).
As Paul Harvey would say:
"…and now…you know…the rest of the story…
Good day"
see above
an example or 2 of Paul Harvey using ellipses:
well worth a listen
Really? where can i find this folder?
This exact same thing happened to me when my dad was dying – only I was informed via Yahoo Messenger instead of Facebook.
YES, you should tell her. Just say something like “hey, you don’t know me, blah blah, your dad has cancer, prognosis is unknown, just thought you should know, if you want to get in touch with him message me back and I’ll give you his contact info, but please let me know you got this message either way. I have no dog in this fight and whatever you want to do is ok.”
If she responds, great, if not, oh well. She’d be completely within her rights to do nothing. Considering this man is biologically related to her, she at least needs to know for her own health history’s sake, even if he did smoke his way into it.
Don’t wait until he gets his prognosis. I was told my dad was dying on a Monday night in late November and was told he had about another month. He died 2 days later.
Paul Harvey is…dead.
Click on your messages, in your main navigation bar on the left hand side of your main page. This will show you your main inbox. Over on the left again, next to where it says “Inbox” it should say “Other.” Click on Other, that’s the folder.