One autumn day nine years ago Mutty Kiss of Monsey New York noticed a swollen lump on the underside of his jaw. His dentist and oral surgeon couldn’t find anything so he made an appointment with his general practitioner who sent him for CT scans and then to an oncologist. The oncologist thought it might be Hodgkin’s disease.

“That Friday night we didn’t sleep. My husband thought It’s over” his wife Randy Apt remembers.

That Monday the Kisses went to see the Tosher Rebbe in Montreal Quebec for brachos and chizuk. What followed was a whirlwind of hospital hopping biopsies and meeting with experts in an attempt to diagnose Mr. Kiss. Doctors finally determined he had poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma a cancer of epithelial tissue but they never pinpointed the primary origin of the disease.

Over the next few months Mr. Kiss underwent multiple chemotherapy treatments. The following winter difficulty breathing prompted doctors to perform a tracheotomy and place a breathing tube in his neck. The tube which made breathing easier compromised Mr. Kiss’s speaking abilities and after the tracheotomy he lost a lot of weight and his condition deteriorated slowly.

It was devastating for the children who ranged in age from ten to 25 to witness their father’s decline. “When you have little kids watching their father die it tears at you ” remembers Mrs. Apt who has since remarried and relocated to Detroit Michigan.

As the summer progressed Mr. Kiss couldn’t keep food down and became jaundiced so she brought him to the hospital. “I thought they’d fix him up — give him liquids flush him out ” Mrs. Apt says. “But that didn’t happen. He didn’t leave the hospital.”

Three and a half weeks later Mr. Kiss closed his eyes for the last time.

“I was 45 when he died” says Mrs. Apt. “We were going to be married 26 years that fall. Who would have thought we wouldn’t have grown old together?”