Dying Man Makes Final Request Of Wife: To Have A Baby
When Lucy first met her future husband, Paul, at medical school, she thought he was a bit of nerd who maybe took himself a little too seriously. Then she noticed his ID badge: he was wearing a fake mustache. That’s when Lucy began to fall in love, and later she would marry him. Then the news came, it was bad. Although Paul had never smoked, he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He was terminal.
“After he got diagnosed, I asked him, ‘What do you need from me? Do you want to travel with your brothers? Do you want me to help you accomplish something that doesn’t include me?’ For him to essentially say, ‘No, I want to be with you… I want to spend my whole life with you,’ was so romantic,” Lucy told GMA.
Then he told Lucy his dying wish was to have a baby. When she asked him if that would make dying harder, his response was “Yes.” To Paul, if having a baby made dying harder, then knowing that kind of love, feeling that much love before he passed away, was worthwhile. So they had a daughter together.
“There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant… that message is simple, you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years. A joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests satisfied,” those are some of Paul’s final words to his daughter in his New York Times best-selling memoir When Breath Becomes Air.
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