My uncle, Daniel Franco, died Saturday, December 8th, at 12:45 p.m. He woke 10 days ago, found himself on a respirator, and demanded, with the strength he had left, to be taken off of it though he knew his heart would give out without life support and that he would die of congestive heart failure. He was not afraid to die. His heart was enlarged, his body was massively swollen with edema, and his colon, they discovered, had developed a brood of untreatable cancerous nodules. He was to be delivered to hospice Saturday to be kept comfortable, but he didn’t want to be kept comfortable. He wanted to go home, to the river, where he belonged. He told us so in writing and in hand gestures on Friday night before he slipped into the last of his morphine-drip sleeps. He was not agitated at that point, but insistent: “HOME,” he wrote. And: “Did it snow in Alpine?” (We all know that if it snows in Alpine, the river rises.) He had not recovered his vocal cords, but he tried to talk anyway, on the phone with one of his daughters, with my brother, with my father. To my father he whispered, “What’s going on, Brother?" I was with him and his wife Angie when he went, and I'm thankful for that, but it's been a blow too. A huge part of my childhood went with him. He was 65.
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