In the overnight hours of April 28-29 my dear Dad, Gerard, passed away. Even though he was in a coma for the last few days, Caroline and I were by his side. Dad was born in 1934 and had to endure WW2 and the bombing of his hometown Rotterdam. As a 10 year old boy he lost his mother to the famine caused by the nazis. He suffered great trauma that never completely healed. Dad started out as an entrepreneur repairing ships in the Rotterdam harbor. He was a machinist, engineering manager in a candy factory and later a planner calculating cost and timelines of projects as big as the Dutch Deltaworks. Dad sacrificed his free weekends to help me build a telescope I designed when I was only 13 years old. That telescope still works and is presently at my home in WI. He was a kind man, never got into an argument. His hospice nurses also commented on how kind he was. In the last 4 months of his life I took the foot off the accelerator at work to create more time to be his caregiver. That soon became a 24/7 task due to his stage 5 / 6 Lewy Body dementia. It is not a one man job, but I had promised him not to send him to a nursing home

With gratitude