Jake McConahay, the 7-year-old Indiana boy who endeared employees at , succumbed to cancer in his mother's arms recently.
“God answered our prayers that he was able to walk to the end and not be in pain or suffer,” Jake’s grandmother, Lynn McConahay, said. “He loved his Dunedin home, thanks to you all.”
Jake, who was actually born in Clearwater, was diagnosed in October 2010 with a rare and extremely aggressive cancer (Stage IV Alveolar Rhabdomyosarcoma). He was a month shy of his 7th birthday. By January 2011, doctors announced that the cancer had spread to his lungs, pancreas and stomach. They gave him six months to live.
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He passed away on Aug. 31.
Jake leaves behind his mother Tosha, father Ben, younger sister Gracie, and toddler brother Jonathan.
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The family visited Beso Del Sol — what Jake dubbed "the party house" — three months prior to his diagnosis. His final wishes was to vacation there again. Jake's family returned to the Bayshore Boulevard twice after his diagnosis, and again in .
“It’s kinda one last blast,” his father Ben McConahay, 27, said poolside during their first post-diagnosis trip in April.
Dunedin became a retreat from the chemotherapy and doctors home in Indiana.
In an online journal, Tosha pours her heart out to those inspired by Jake.
“I know Jake is happy, I know that he is closer than I can see myself,” she wrote in the journal two weeks after his passing. “I can feel him, I know he watches over us.”
During his final days, she writes that she remembers sitting on her couch watching his every move, afraid to even use the bathroom. Jake’s fever spiked at 106.3 degrees. He could barely speak, she wrote.
“I rubbed his hair for hours, afraid I would forget what it felt like. I used a stethoscope to try to hear every word that he spoke, afraid I would forget the sound of his voice,” she wrote.
In the end, she told her little boy it was OK to go. She wanted the pain to stop for him. He had been through enough.
“Go on and love your spouse. Love them even when you dislike them. Hug them anyways,” she ended her most recent journal entry. “Love anyways, dream anyways … live anyways.”
