Dear friends, family, and kind-hearted strangers,

On Saturday, January 25th, 2025, one minute before 8 am, I received a phone call from the hospital with news that life-saving measures had just been performed unsuccessfully, resulting in the unexpected passing of my dad, Jeff Zahrt. I had planned to go visit him that morning as he was hospitalized with severe pneumonia.

In the early spring of 2023, my dad had been having stomach pains he just brushed off as hernia pain. That was also around the same time when he and several of his coworkers lost their jobs. The company he was employed with was losing a contract he specifically worked with and was promised a job within. However, in a group meeting and at the age of 62, he and the others were informed their employment was ending.

Not yet ready to retire, dad found a new employer close to home that wasn’t necessarily hiring but wanted him part of their company for all of his years and expertise in logistics. The pain he was experiencing in his upper stomach gradually worsened, making it hard to eat, and weight was just falling off his bones.

He was settling in with his new workflow in the fall of 2023 and finally had an appointment for a scope to see what, if anything, was going on in his digestive tract. A biopsy was done during the procedure and the report came back with cancer. Esophageal cancer.

The plan was to insert a feeding tube as the tumor was restricting him from eating and do radiation and chemo in hopes of shrinking the tumor, then the surgeon would remove it. After months of treatment, a CT scan showed the tumor shrunk! It was go time and surgery was scheduled. This was also the same time his new employer, while being empathetic to the time off he needed, decided to move him to part-time to not even “having work” for him to do. There goes that income and then they were financially surviving solely off of my mom’s disability.

On the day of surgery, May 2024, dad arrived to check in and he no longer had a surgery scheduled that day. After finally getting in touch with the surgeon’s office, we found out the cancer had spread. They had been waiting on final results of the PET scan, which were now resulted, and the surgeon would not operate on dad until further review. The umbilical hernia he also had that was now a huge bulging, painful ball would not be operable either. All I could think was how awful of a quality of life he will be having, but maybe he will get better?

Dad continued chemo and pain management through the end of 2024. In January 2025, he became very sick with pneumonia. His stubbornness kept him from being admitted to the hospital for care the first time he went to the emergency room, and then about a week later, he went again and never came home.

As we are still coming to terms with my dad’s passing, my mom has been hit with the financial burden of cremation expenses during this already challenging time of the loss of her high school sweetheart.

Any contribution, no matter how small, will help alleviate the financial strain and allow her to focus on grieving and other unforeseen bills that have been rolling in.

Our family appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and messages of support during this difficult time. Your kindness means the world to us as we navigate through our grief. Thank you for your compassion and generosity.

With heartfelt gratitude,

Kayla