https://news.yahoo.com/father-8-set-2nd-vaccine-140641747.html

EMILY SHAPIROSat, June 19, 2021, 7:06 AM·6 min read

This Father’s Day will be an especially difficult one for many of the more than 600,000 American families mourning the death of a loved one to COVID-19.

Among those is the Ballard family in North Carolina, grappling with the loss of their patriarch.

Gordon Ballard, a devoted husband and father of eight who pushed through a lifelong illness to provide for his family, died of COVID-19 on May 17, 2021, his daughter said.

The 65-year-old tested positive two weeks earlier, on May 3 — the same day he was set to get his second vaccine dose.

Dedicated dad

As a child in upstate New York, Ballard had a unique career in mind: funeral director, one of his daughters, Sharena Ballard-Hart, told ABC News.

He attended the Simmons Institute of Funeral Service in Syracuse before interning at a funeral home in Rochester. He was there working a funeral when he fell for the decedent’s daughter, Sandra.

Gordon and Sandra married and would have celebrated their 40th anniversary this July, Ballard-Hart said of her parents.

The Ballards’ road to parenthood began quickly. When Sandra’s mother died, the young couple took in Sandra’s 4-year-old brother, Quinton, and raised him as their own son.

“I just remember them picking me up with my suitcase, taking me home. At the time we lived above a funeral home,” the Ballards’ eldest child, Quinton Wilburn, told ABC News.

After welcoming Sharena and her brother Marcus, the Ballards decided to become foster parents and adopted five children.

As a father of eight, Gordon Ballard was a hard worker and “very generous,” Wilburn said.

“He watched ‘Jeopardy’ faithfully every single day” and wanted his family to think “he knew everything,” Ballard-Hart added.

He was also protective of his wife. Whenever Ballard had a health battle, he was always more concerned about Sandra, Ballard-Hart said.

Gordon Ballard was born with sickle cell anemia — a disorder in which there aren’t enough healthy red blood cells to move oxygen through the body — and suffered one or two crises per year, his daughter said.

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