Last Week on Tuesday, I watched my father die. My brother Josh was there, as was Dad’s wife, Joyce. We were standing around his bed as the Hospital Staff unplugged his life support. The previous Thursday Morning, he had a massive heart attack and stopped breathing. But they managed to get his heart restarted but he had been without oxygen to his brain for about five minutes. He was in a coma since the heart attack.

We held on to hope that he would recover. That he would wake up. An MRI scan was done and it showed a glimmer of hope, initially… But then a neurologist took a look at it and determined that the damage was severe throughout all of the brain.

We all knew Dad didn’t want to live like this. He had a DNR on file… that the hospital wasn’t aware of initially… And we knew his chances were almost zero, and it turns out to have been exactly zero. We didn’t know what would happen once we pulled the life support… He his body could kick in and he’d live. Or he would expire… Doctors said it could be five minutes or five days… In God’s mercy, it was only about 1 minute. His body gasped for air for awhile and then the gasps came fewer and fewer until it all stopped.

In the very moment of his passing… He smiled. Just before he went slack. I believe it’s because he saw his Father, his Mother, his brother Bruce, and my brother Zach.

I’m grateful for these last few years I had with him… Because we had always had a rocky relationship and I had learned a great deal about him that I didn’t know. This knowledge became an understanding of the reality of things that he had always kept away from me and my brothers. All the pieces came together and the picture it made was one of a man that sacrificed so much for us. For me. I didn’t know how much he loved me until the end. I had no idea. I miss him terribly.