The Irasburg resident said he was diagnosed in early December with cancer in his lungs that has spread throughout his body. Mosher, 74, said that he initially thought he was suffering from an “upper-respiratory bug that has been going around.
“In less than two months, though, I have gone from feeling pretty good to being in hospice care,” he wrote on his public Facebook page on Sunday. “Our kids and grandkids have been with us, and I’m comfortable.”
Mosher, who set much of his work in his adopted Northeast Kingdom, noted last week that his forthcoming novel Points North, which features his longtime characters the Kinneson family, would be released this winter. In his Facebook message, Mosher said that his wife of 52 years, Phillis, would handle further announcements about its publication.
Mosher, a New York native who settled in the Northeast Kingdom after graduating college, said the lung cancer stemmed from radiation treatments he underwent nine years ago to defeat prostate cancer. Those treatments, and the subsequent cross-country road trip he took to celebrate their success, were the basis for his 2012 book The Great Northern Express.
“I am grateful for those nine good years,” he wrote on Sunday.
Mosher’s announcement comes just four months after the death of his close friend, the Northeast Kingdom poet Leland Kinsey, from lymphoma.
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I am greatly saddened to hear this news, Howard Frank Mosher. I treasure your writing and your distillation of the Vermont lives that are too often invisible to others, but which are integral to our character.. I also recall your time, generously offered to a CCV class I took some years ago in Barre.
I wish you peace and moments of joy as you now distill your days.
Reiki sent.
go to Boston, unless you’re on your dying bed already, it’s treatable!