Sad news. Our beloved son, Jeff, has passed away.

CC Family,

It is with great sadness that we report our beloved son, Jeff, passed away at home in the evening on 9/25/13. He was surrounded by our family and friends.

Some of you are familiar with our story and others are not. Our wonderful Jeff was diagnosed with CC about 14 months ago. Because Jeff had developmental disabilities and high functioning autism, we decided not to tell him. We knew that this would only frighten and worry him. We did not want to place that burden on him during his battle. Amazingly, he was able to carry on with his normal routine up until the end. He continued working up until a couple of weeks ago, because he absolutely loved his job and his friends at work. He continued his Saturday morning bowling up until a couple of months ago and even then he wanted to go to watch and support his friends.

We are grateful to the many wonderful, compassionate and caring doctors, nurses and medical professionals that assisted us with Jeff’s care. We are very thankful that we have two top-notch medical facilities in USC and UCLA that are close to us. We were able to utilize both of these medical centers during the course of his treatment. We are confident that between our local physicians and these two great medical centers we were able to get Jeff the very best medical treatment possible.

He was blessed with a high pain tolerance and did not take narcotic pain meds until about 2 days prior. He just never would complain. If people would ask him how he was doing, he would simply say “I am blessed”. We are very thankful that God chose us to be his earthly parents.
We are humbled by the outpouring of love and support from his work family at Mattel as well as our friends and family. We simply could not get through this without our loving family and friends.

During Jeff’s last 14 months, we were able to enjoy many things together. We took him to Las Vegas, Minnesota three times and Hawaii. We were able to enjoy a Minnesota Vikings game, a Laker game and get Jeff’s picture with Kobe. We were able to enjoy a Stanford football game with field passes and get his picture with the cheerleaders of both teams as well as some of the football players. We will have these wonderful memories to cherish for the rest of our lives.

The CC Family was such an important part of our lives following Jeff’s diagnosis. We are deeply grateful for the friendship and support, encouragement and prayers, well-wishes and day to day practical helpful information that our CC Family has provided. I wish I would have posted more. But even when we weren’t posting, we were reading about and praying for our CC Family members. We will be forever thankful.

This week has been a very busy one for us, making the arrangements. The services for our Jeffrey will be tomorrow (Friday, 10/4/13). His obituary can be found online at the website for White & Day Mortuary or at LAfuneral.com.

Bob & Nancy McCandless
(jeff’smom&dad)