Miller used every minute because 'you never know'

The last time I saw Larry Miller, I went to his house to say goodbye ...

Gail Miller, his devoted wife of 48 years, called Thursday to update me on her husband's condition and invite me for a last visit. You should come today, she said; the end was near.

Seven months ago, Miller asked me to write a book about his life. It was something we had discussed on and off for seven years, but both of us were busy with other things, and the book became something we would do "someday."

Then he was hospitalized for 59 days last summer with a heart attack and other serious health problems. After he was released from the hospital, Miller called, and I knew why.

"We'd better do that book now," he said. "You never know."

On Thursday afternoon, I was back at the Miller house, where I had spent so many late afternoons and weekends talking with Miller about his life. We talked and talked and talked. We talked at the kitchen table, over Gail's homemade lunches. We talked in the hospital while he underwent dialysis. We talked while he lay in bed in the upstairs bedroom of his home until he fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. We talked in his Jordan office once. We talked through the late summer. We talked through the fall. We talked into the onset of winter.

We talked until he could talk no more — until, finally, he was forced to spend all his energy fighting for his life. The book was important to him; there were stories, lessons and experiences he wanted to pass on. Little did I know, until those last weeks, that we were in a race against time.

Gail greeted me as I entered her home, which was filled with a deep silence. Kindly and soft-spoken, Gail has a calming influence on everyone near her, and it is occasions like this that she must be a great source of comfort for others. Her devotion to Larry and her family was heroic and would take more space than I have here to chronicle, except for this:

I had almost been moved to tears as I watched her tend to Larry's needs over these months. I had watched her clean and treat her husband's diabetes-ravaged feet several times while Larry and I talked at the kitchen table. I had seen her harvest vegetables from the garden to make his favorite lunch. I had seen her hoisting his big wheelchair in and out of the car and drive him to his daily appointments, most of them with doctors.