Help Me With My Vietnam Vet Dad's Sudden Passing

Hello, and thank you for reading our story.

My father, Dewayne, passed away suddenly on February 14, 2024. He'd been in poor health for years that deteriorated after a bout of COVID in May of 2022. According to my uncle, his brother, my dad complained of feeling ill over the last week, though he said nothing about it to me. He passed away in the night, found by his caretaker in the morning. He joins my mother, Janis, who passed away thirty years ago in November of 1994.

I am his sole next-of-kin, his only child, and to say that I was unprepared for this is an understatement. I have no idea what I'm doing, and I do not have the resources to make it happen. Which is the reason for this fundraiser—to help with the costs of laying him to rest—but let me tell you about Dewayne, first. Give you an idea of the guy I called Dad for almost 47 years.

My dad was born April 15, 1946, in Marysville, California, to Dustbowl immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas. He was a Boy Scout, a talented fisherman, a professional photographer, a warehouseman, a newspaper editor, and a theater director. He led a long and storied life—though, he did have a penchant for embellishment and exaggeration, so it's a mystery how many of his stories were true and how many were For Entertainment Purposes Only. He had a healthy ego that teetered on the edge of obnoxious, but hid years of pain and trauma from everyone who knew him.

My dad was drafted for the Army during the Vietnam War right out of high school, which cost him his job as a photographer for the Appeal-Democrat, his then-girlfriend, and much of the respect of his hometown peers. He drifted for a while, despondent at the loss of his life at home and tortured by his experiences, unsure of what to do with himself. He was, according to childhood friends, not the same when he returned from war.

Eventually, his mother became frustrated and ordered him to bring her lunch every day at the local museum where she worked. This put him in direct contact with the cute blonde who worked the front desk, a fellow Marysville native and Navy engineer named Jan. They would marry a few months later, in 1975, at the courthouse in Reno. Two years later, I joined the team. He took a good job at a warehouse, eventually moving into newspaper production in the 1990s. His favorite things to do were fishing, shooting his gun collection at the range, going on long drives, and watching the 49ers and the San Francisco Giants. He was an early adopter of computer technology, a coder, programmer, and desktop publisher until the tech progressed past him, and I became his #1 source of tech support. :P

My dad spent sixty years haunted by ghosts he refused to talk about, and on the rare occasions he did he would become choked up and distant for a little while. He had fun stories from basic training and his stint in Germany, but he rarely spoke about his experiences in Vietnam. He had a temper, and always had to be the smartest guy in the room. Knew everything about everything, always right—typical stubborn old coot. It may very well have been the thing that got him in the end. He refused to go to the hospital; he said for years he didn't want to die in one, so it may have been a conscious choice, or it was just his own reluctance to ask for help. We'll never know.

He didn't want a funeral, though I do plan to have a celebration of his life—and my mother's, as she did not get a funeral either—later this year. He wanted a Viking funeral, but seeing as how that's pretty illegal, he chose cremation as a backup plan. The cost of basic cremation, with no viewing and no ceremony, is around $1100, quite far outside of my retail-worker budget. I also live in Massachusetts and must travel to California to see to his apartment and his cat, as well as see my family and his friends, and I have to ship his belongings back east as well as put the rest in a storage unit in California, until I can either sell some things or come back for them.

So what I have to cover includes:

If you can help out with a donation or share this fundraiser, that would be greatly appreciated. I grossly underestimated how expensive death is for the people left behind.

It pains me that I can only do the bare minimum for him, but he wasn't a good planner, he was disabled and poor on a fixed income, so of course he had no plan in place and no life insurance. I can only do what I can, and I can't do anything without help.

(Adding insult to injury, my birthday is on February 23rd, nine days after his death. As I update this after the fact, I can tell you that was a pretty crappy day to say the least. I've never felt as lonely as I did sitting in a rental car in a hotel parking lot in Yuba City, CA, sobbing because I didn't get the annual phone call at 6:50am, wishing me a happy birthday.)

Thank you for reading all of this. Love to everyone. Hug your parents, if you can and hug your kids if you have them. You never know which hug will be the last.

—Anna