Fly in the Eye Photographic Arts

Monte Arnold

Abbotsford, BC - Canada

I didn't feel like I had accomplished enough with my fundraiser in June, so I will continue to donate proceeds from my sales here until there is enough to make a difference...

It will be 3 years ago this June that we lost my dad, Don Arnold, to ALS, or more accurately, a variation of it.

In fact, three of dad's brothers, as well as his mother, all had this disease, so we've been watching the effects of this degeneration for decades. For my father, he began feeling the effects of ALS 18 years before it ended his life.

Fortunately, dad's voice never left him, so he was able to communicate right to the end. For a man who loved words and language as much as he did, that was truly a blessing.

He also took every opportunity to look for things he could see joy in through out his life, and when ALS robbed him of another dignity, he would search for something else that he could still wake up to.
His daily goals were always the same;
-always look for ways to be better than he was,
-and to do whatever it took to ease the strain on my mother, the woman he had called his bride, ultimately for 56 years.

Even two weeks before we lost him, he managed to get on his exercise bike for 30 minutes, and he always tried to keep his weight up.

Life was a project he simply was not finished with yet.

He studied Spanish every day until the very end, despite the thickness of his tongue making it difficult to create the sounds. To be honest, it may be a somewhat selfish thing to write such a long letter about him, going in to details and stories in depth about him. Truthfully, I am so afraid that I might start to forget the details. Other people have passed away of course, and there are always things forgotten about their lives, and Dad is just too important to us all to forget any part of him.

So thank you for indulging me, and for taking the time.

Monte Arnold
MonteThePhotographer@gmail.com
http://monte-arnold.artistwebsites.com/
http://montethephotographer.com