Tucker Carlson took to social media on Wednesday to announce that his father has passed away and that he would be taking a break from his program for an as yet undetermined amount of time.

The former standout Fox News host wrote a lengthy obituary for Richard Warner Carlson who died at the age of 84 on March 24 at his home in Boca Grande, Fla. “after six weeks of illness” during which he “refused all painkillers and leaving “this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.”

Carlson provided further details about the unique, sometimes tragic, but always intriguing life and times his father lived:

He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.