As prostate cancer spread through my 93-year-old father-in-law in faraway Grand Rapids Michigan, my wife Karen wondered when she should return to his bedside. Twenty years earlier she had drawn on her Hospice training when her mother, Gerry, died at home from pancreatic cancer. Karen caressed her face, kissed her and repeated, “I love you. It’s OK, mom, you can go now. I love you.” 
    Gerry’s breathing grew quieter, slower and slower, until it peacefully ended.
    Karen's dad surprised her by quickly failing after he voluntarily moved into assisted living last July, which we shared in two of these columns. This gentle, dapper soul thrived at first, making new friends and sketching the squabbling geese and songbirds on the pond outside his window. A family friend invited him out to dances, as did a new friend. “She was pretty too,” he chuckled. 
    Suddenly two weeks before Christmas he entered the hospital. He had told the nurse, ‘I feel funny.”
    Feeling funny meant a tumor pressing nerves along his spine. Karen spent Christmas wheeling him into radiation treatments and arranging Hospice care. Hospice said if they get patients back to their assisted living, they can stay there ninety percent of the time. 
    Karen, physicians and physical therapists helped him return to his friends and the cackles of his pondmates. Two days before New Years, he leaned on Karen and a cane for a triumphal entry to the applause of his fellow diners.  
    Karen left January 1st, wondering how many more months he had. He had less than one.
    In January she heard him struggle with words, and learned he began morphine. Other changes followed: he struggled with his walker and now pushed a wheelchair; he fell one night and now slept in a hospital bed; and he missed breakfast and now aides dressed him every morning. 
    She worried about the right time to return. How would she know? Should she ask him? Or would that scare him? Upset him?  Should she just go? She asked the head nurse. She asked Hospice. Finally she asked him. He said, “No, that would interfere with your trip to England.”
    We have no trip planned for England. 
    Last Thursday morning Karen’s sister called to say she should come immediately.  When Karen arrived at midnight, the nurse said, “I think he’s waiting for you.”
    He slept with labored breathing through oxygen tubes. Caregivers brought her a mattress. She spent the night by his bedside, talking to him, caressing his face, kissing him.  She surrounded him with words and love from our children and me. In the morning when he halfway opened his blue eyes, she would say, “Dad, it’s me, Karen.”
    Each time his eyelids fluttered. 
    She kept repeating, “It’s OK, Dad, you can go now.  Mom is waiting for you. I love you. We’ll miss you, Dad but it’s OK to go.” His breathing grew quieter, slower and slower, until it peacefully ended.
    She made it. Twice.
    She said, “I feel so blessed to have been there for both my parents.”