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Dear Daughter,

I'm up here in Montana, and I found your thread on John H. Barton, my dad, most touching. There are a few things I'd change if I could -- leave earlier when you hear your dad is in the hospital. Don't stay in a motel when you can drive on and maybe see him sooner. Answer his letters, call him on the phone, and don't leave a few choice words hanging unsaid which should have been delivered in person, by phone, or by letter.

The last words I heard him say, when I called, were "I'm too tired to talk to him."

That was when I thought the morning would be soon enough to say the last farewell. As it was, all I could do was drive up to the old homestead, where I was a toddler in 1953, climb the hill to the old windmill, and cry my heart out in the cold, bitter, Montana wind.

He was a sheep herder, a rancher, an alfalfa farmer, a school board member, father of three daughters and one son, and a great conversationalist. He was wounded in WWII, and tended that wound faithfully for the last year of his life, bullet fragments still in the leg bones. He was almost 83.

Now we move on. Our house is clean and fixed. You have school to attend to. What broke the anguish for me was seeing him, in my mind's eye, standing in a new, clean white robe smiling at how everything came out, surrounded by those dear to him.

His home was a tribute to our sparse letters and pictures. There was your sister's wedding pictures, family photos from when he visited us, Christmas pictures in prominent places, even the picture of you and your fiancee in the very corner of his cabinet.

So take heart. We all live and die. Life is lived between birth and death. Someday, when we hope it is not too late, we will take it seriously. That way it is not too painful to go or let go.