by Kim Keller

I can still hear my father’s voice pleading with me,   “Kim, pull the car around! I’ve gotta go!”  His frustration was palpable as he kept saying this over and over to me.   He was deliriously sick, and you could just feel his struggle.  He was in the hospital, which is where he’d been spending a great deal of time, and I thought, of course, that he was desperately trying to break out of the hospital and get back home.  Not that I could blame him, but he was so sick that the idea of leaving the hospital was simply unthinkable.  I had no idea that he was really trying to tell me something entirely different.  Then a couple of weeks later, my dad died.  And it wasn’t until a year later, while I was reading an amazing book called Final Gifts, that I finally understood what he was so urgently trying to say — I’m dying, Kim.