My stepdad died at 8 AM this morning.

This has been a long time coming. He's been sick for almost six years. It was an Alzheimer's-type disease, although we don't know what specific type of dementia. We have given his body to the University of South Alabama for research. The disease progressed extremely fast. Six years ago he was a manager at a mill bringing home a hefty salary, going bass fishing, and living life to the fullest. Now he's dead.

He was always the type of guy who wanted to get to the good part, fast, and never spend time on things that were boring, uncomfortable, or unnecessary. When he died we were standing in the room with him, and my mom asked me what he would say if he were with us. I said he would say, "Come on, let's go!" And she laughed, because he always did say that. He has hurried on to the good part now.



This is a passage from a pamphlet that one of the nurses gave us:

GONE FROM MY SIGHT

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

              Henry Van Dyke


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