Great. When it rains, it pours, apparently.
I lost my step-father (for all intents and purposes, he was the man that acted as my father) on October 19th of this year, to cancer of indeterminate origin, though the doctors suspect it was pancreatic cancer which metastasized aggressively. He was diagnosed in late July, when the cancer was at Stage 4 and untreatable with anything other than pain medication. We thought we'd have about 6-9 months with him. It turned out that we had less than three. That the anime world has also lost such a great director (I've seen most of his works and loved each of them - I own several outright and was thankful to see Tokyo Godfathers on the Auraria Campus Theater when it rolled through Denver) to the same fate is tragic. Pancreatic cancer is brutal and has less than a 5% survival rate, due to how it presents itself and how slowly it progresses, up until the point where it becomes untreatable. By the time a victim finds out they have it, it's usually at too late a stage to do anything about it. More research into this killer might yield better tests for it at an early stage, when treatment options are more likely to have a positive outcome for the patient. As it is, because it is a 'non-sexy' form of cancer and because its survival rate is so low, it does not have the advocacy that, say, breast cancer has. Advocacy = research dollars and for too long, investigation into this form of cancer has taken a back seat, even though the death rate from pancreatic cancer is much higher in proportion to the number of cases of the illness than other forms of cancer. My heart goes out to Satoshi Kon's family for their loss and I would encourage Crunchyroll's members to follow #3 on keikawa's list: donate to pancreatic cancer research in the name of this wonderful director. Or my father, as he also was a good man taken from his family too soon.
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