The bad news is, that after months of fighting the good fight with liver cancer, my grandfather succumed to kidney failure today...just hours after I left his house near the Canadian border.  I knew that I would never see him alive again.  I did not know that he would pass away before I got to Bemidji.

I've been asked to write a eulogy.  It's a big job to eulogize a great man.

My parents were greatly comforted/relieved when he accepted the eucharist yesterday, for the first time in his life. 

To me, it is most important that he lived as a person should live.

While we were up there visiting, they were giving him morphine tablets to dissolve under his tongue.  He was told that the tablets should bring relief within fifteen minutes.  If it didn't he was supposed to take another one.

Grandpa always took things like this very seriously, but especially self-care things.  For years, he has put five miles a day on his stationary bicycle...including during his chemo treatments.

He assigned himelf daily chores, and made sure that he performed them every day.  Whenever he could, he looked for additional ways to help my mom around the house as time and energy permitted.  He kept track of his own medications, and managed his own affairs to the largest extent possible.

So needless to say, when the morphine tablet he took didn't help within fifteen minutes, he took another one.l  It knocked him competely loopy for 24 hours.  We showed up near the end of this timee, and he said "I'll never do THAT again" and went back to sleep.

A ittle later he woke upand said "I can't believe people pay money to feel like this.  That doesn't make sense."

A few hours later, he perked up again, and I asked him  if he would like to see Grasshopper, who had been able to come with me.  He nodded and said "yeah".

So I went upstairs and got Grasshopper and told him that Great-grandpa was ready to talk to him.

He went down there, and my grandpa craned his neck so that he could see Grasshopper and his little cousin, who had also come down.  He was somewhat hampered by his weakened state and the oxygen hose and other accoutrements.  He looked over at them and made eye contact, and said:

"Stay off the dope.  It's terrible.  You can't remember anything from one minute to the next."

They nodded somberly, and he fell back asleep.  My sister and I tried to stifle our giggles, because he said "Stay off the dope" in such a funny way.

A little later, all of us kids were in the room visiting as grandpa faded in-and-out of conciousness.  He'd open his eyes and smile at some fragment of conversation that he over-heard, and then fade out again.

At one point, we ran out of things to say, and lapsed into silence.  Grandpa's eye shot open and he said "Oh!"

We said "You OK grandpa?  You want something, some water or tomato soup or something?"

"No, I'm alright, you were all talking, and you stopped and it was quiet.  It was spooky." then he laughed, and fell back asleep.

He thought he'd died.  Given how difficult it was for him to talk, and how much effort he had to make himself understood at all...it should tell us how important it was to him to be useful to others.  He was helping us with his humor and his advice, taking care of us in his way.

He went down-hill fast over the two-and-a-half days I was there.  From getting with help to visit the bathroom, to having to not being able to drink from a straw.

I held his hand as much as I could, and even when he was unconcious, he would squeeze my hand from time-to-time, to let me know that he knew someone was there.