The Healing Journey

November 4, 2025

“He was a very, very loving, supportive and generous man…”

The week before her beloved father John Woods died, his daughter Trish kept hearing “Let It Be” on the radio whenever she was in the car.

“I really felt it was a way of God preparing me for what was coming because it is such a beautiful song and speaks of Mother Mary,” she recalled.

A clinical social worker who runs a family caregiver program for a Long Island medical center, she was 35 at the time John went through his illness journey and had a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

“I still remember the day my father was diagnosed with melanoma,” she said. “I was with him at the mall along with my son and daughter. Even 22 years later, I still think back to that day when he received a call that he had a diagnosis of cancer.”

Then followed the process of biopsies and surgeries and anxious hours in hospital waiting rooms.

“He was a very, very loving, supportive and generous man, and from the day he received his diagnosis until the end of his life, he never spoke a lot about how the illness affected him,” she said.

Both John and his wife Patricia had been caregivers for their parents, and Trish took a leave of absence to care for her father and her two young children.

John had his surgery in the spring, and as Trish recalls, “Basically they said, ‘Go home and carry on with your life now.’” Her parents went on a trip to Ireland in September, but by the end of October he started showing symptoms again.

“The cancer had spread,” she said. “Throughout that time it was like an emotional roller coaster. You feel like your whole life revolves around the cancer, and everything else that’s going on in life is just like the little details.” There were also many trips to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for treatments.

“In hindsight, we really didn’t recognize until very close to the end of his life how sick he was and how short the time was,” she said. “It was constantly, always that goal of continuing treatments and getting to the next step. Unfortunately, despite the treatments and him doing everything he needed to do and our faith and the doctors doing everything they could do, he came to the end of his life.”

John Woods passed on June 18, 2002 at 59 years old.

John was very close to his mother, Margaret, who died from a stroke when he was 19, but he never spoke about her because it was too emotionally difficult for him, Trish says.

“But two weeks before he died, he kept saying her name,” she recalled. “I guess it depends on one’s belief system, but I am a big believer in that there is a heaven and something after this … and I think the people who have gone before us are waiting for us, and I really do think she was waiting for him. To take him home.”

To hear “Let It Be,” click here: (https://youtu.be/QDYfEBY9NM4?si=51KtDIxf6fwC94Ln)

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