Honoring Joseph Gordon: A Final Farewell

My name is Alice, my husband's name is Joseph (Joe). Joe had an appointment to fulfill this past Saturday. Our Lord had called his name and we had to say goodbye “for now” but we’ll be together again.

My story is long, it may seem crazy in part, but if you know our family…it fits!

(Here we go)

Anyone that knew my husband knows what a character he was. We met as teenagers working at A&P Food Store over forty-seven years ago. We had good times and we had bad times. My husband was a “my way or the highway” kind of guy. No one was going to change him. We married, had a beautiful daughter, Christina. We divorced for a few years, so Joe could get the running out of his system and then reunited through the love of Jesus our Lord. We remarried and had our second beautiful daughter Melody. We were blessed to have three handsome grandsons, Dylan, Brandon and Tyler. My husband's life didn’t just take some turns for the worse, but he was the victim of opiate addiction, which destroyed the man he was and could have been.

I lost close contact with him once he was diagnosed with Frontal Temporal Dementia. I could never really be sure if his choices in life were due to the mental disease or drug addiction.

He and I reconnected this past July when I learned he was in the emergency room. He had been living with a female patient that he left the nursing home with nineteen months earlier. She called 911, and abandoned him. Pretty much left him for dead, I believe because she discovered he had reached out to me the prior week for help.

The Joe Gordon we all knew was now a 100 lb. battered and abused dying man. I stayed with him and helped as much as possible. All medical staff put up security blocks to prevent her from harming him any more.

On the evening of Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 the equipment was turned off. Joe's body was riddled with infection from all the wounds. The days perhaps weeks of sitting in his own urine and feces caused organ failures.

My husband had suffered enough and it was my responsibility to set him free. For years I tried to convince myself that things could’ve been better if it were not for the drug abuse, but when I look back at the forty-seven years of knowing Mr. Joseph Gordon, I have to wonder if he went undiagnosed for the Frontal Temporal Dementia.

I hope our history and life challenges will open up future conversations about the disease. It may strike a person in their early years. Possibly individuals that abuse substances may be trying to self medicate the battles they suffer within.

Our family is finding peace now that we know my husband, the girls' father and my grandsons' grandfather is no longer in pain. We hope to all be together one day in the presence of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

New heavenly bodies for ever and ever…. Amen!

I’m told I only have a small window of time to try and gather the funds to give my husband a proper service. My family and I thank you all for sharing your lives with the one and only Joseph Jay Gordon.