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An Update and my most heartfelt gratitude for all who offered prayers and kind words for my father.

Daddy died Saturday night October 23 at home with my mother. It was exactly eleven weeks after his diagnosis. Our prayers were answered because Dad was never in any pain or distress. He was not truly bed ridden until Saturday afternoon. Mom had just started worrying that maybe she wouldn’t be able to care for him after all but then he was gone.

My sister and I saw him for the last time exactly one week before. He was so very weak. Before I left I sat beside him, resting my head on his chest. To my untrained ear, his heart sounded weak and erratic. I was able to tell him everything I wanted him to know.

I can’t say enough good things about Hospice Care. Dad spent his last days at home receiving visitors and expressing his love for his wife and children. We are coping well because we know we gave him the ending he wanted and because we made his funeral uniquely our own.

Wednesday I made an urn for him from a vase that resembled an egg. Everyone in the family wrote brightly colored messages to him on the outside before we buried his ashes privately in their church’s Memorial Garden. A Service was held later that afternoon. We displayed a picture of Dad’s first Air Force portrait and a framed copy of the poem “High Flight.” My Uncle spoke about how my father, the navigator was finding his way home for the last time with his sextant and the stars.

I never planned to speak at his funeral but I got up in the middle of the night Monday and a Eulogy practically wrote itself. My Uncle read it and urged me to speak at the service because I would never have an opportunity like that again. I’m so glad I did! I wanted everyone to know just how special my Dad was.

I closed with: “He was my father, my hero, my friend and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.”

High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr.