Life is hard, then you die.

Kevin Putzier
2 min readOct 15, 2023

My father is dead. I am lost.

Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash

On August 25th, Carl Frederick Putzier left this mortal coil. This after months of hospitalization, multiple setbacks, and some glimmers of hope. His heart had one event too many. The only bright side is he passed peacefully in his sleep.

I have a long and complicated history with him. He has literally known me for almost 55 years. We have laughed, loved, fought, hated, and philosophized together many thousands of times. On some things, we could not agree. On others, we marched in lockstep. He was a complex man in some ways and deeply wedded to a religion that even he was beginning to understand was false. Or so it seemed before he had his first stroke mere days before the general outbreak of COVID-19.

He largely recovered from the stroke, though he was much weaker and frail. My family and I ended up becoming his and my Mother’s caretakers to a large degree, which they in turn supported as well as they could financially. He was improving.

Then he had a series of heart attacks, wound up in and out of the hospital around 20 times due to the horrid “health care” system we have in America, and then was consigned to die.

He, being as stubborn as his son, was not willing to accept the death sentence. We tried a number of things, which I will not go into depth on, and some of them seemed to be working.

Then on the night of August 28th, he had a massive heart attack. It didn’t kill him outright, he died about six hours later.

I have no real point to this story. If any of you wondered where I went, I was with my Dad. I miss him terribly. I cannot overcome my grief. I can barely function.

Rest in Peace, Old Man, you’re sorely missed!

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Kevin Putzier

I am a practicalist, which means I take political and social ideas from all sides and try to find what works. Mostly Progressive.