He was in the hospital for three weeks, then went home, where friends "came bearing gifts of love and Popsicles, pies and dinners," Bobbi recalls. They'd arranged for home health care, and the agency brought in three huge machines and showed her what to do. She almost collapsed. Their children, always supportive, created a gigantic chart that listed the 15 medications she had to push through his feeding tube. She learned to clean "with total sterility" his tracheotomy each morning and night, an hourlong process.

He was her full-time job, and she says now she'd have starved without meals brought in by her church's Relief Society. Amid the turmoil, she found an unexpected gift — "to learn how much we're loved. You kind of know that, but it really was a tangible thing."

She settled in to become his nervous, exhausted but grateful-he-was-alive nurse.

And Rod endured a most unusual period of silence.

He wrote about that Memorial Day, "sunny with a cool breeze." His daughter Alyssa and her husband, Bud Larson, went out of town, and Rod and Bobbi were enjoying time with their grandchildren, Jessica, 6, Addie, 3, and James, 1. The girls, he wrote, "are exceptionally soft and affectionate with me since my surgery."

Jessica would snuggle down beside him and "talk quietly as though nothing of any consequence had occurred. Addie would hug me until I thought I might lose my breath."

James was the spitting image of Rod's baby pictures. When he was born, Rod wondered if "James might be a heaven-sent message to me that my replacement had arrived on Earth."

He and Jessica played tic-tac-toe on the doodle board he'd used to communicate right after surgery. Addie kept bugging Jessica, to Rod's amusement, and James was investigating and losing car keys, credit cards and cell phones. Jessica could read her grandpa's lips and they'd just talk, "more relaxed than speaking with the most astute adult." She asked about his incision, and when Bobbi said he had surgery so he could breathe through a hole in his neck, she said, "Oh! Congratulations, Grandpa!" and meant it.

A neighbor girl, 3, who'd come over to play, watched them for a few minutes, then disappeared, soon returning with banana cream bars. "Your grandpa," she told Jessica, "can't talk, but he can eat." It was a just-accomplished, new-again skill. The banana cream bars were a perfect celebration.

Those little people had helped him endure his long hospital stay, a "real boost, though they generally turned my room upside down and shut off or readjusted all essential equipment."

As he sat with his adored and adorable grandchildren, Rod's physical and emotional pain started to slip away.