OPINION:
I intended to write this week’s column about the war in Ukraine, but instead, my thoughts and my heart and soul turned to my wife, Kim, who passed away at 41 after a four-year battle with cancer on March 15, 2021.
Kim was lying motionless in her hospice bed that day with her eyes closed and head propped up on a pillow. She had shut her big, beautiful blue eyes for the last time and was no longer able to communicate verbally. I often took my sons to the hospice facility to visit Kim, but I wanted to spare them this last memory of their mother, so I went to see her alone.
I hated cancer because there was nothing I could do to protect my poor wife from its pernicious, remorseless attack on her body. On that last day of Kim’s life, I found yet more anger for the disease, which was taking my wife’s life before my eyes. I was helpless to do anything more than comfort her as she took her last breaths on this earth.
The cancer had ravaged her body by driving her weight to within 10 pounds of our thin-as-a-rail elder son, who was then a half-foot shorter than she was. Cancer never stole Kim’s inner beauty, and it never broke her spirit, especially her love for me and our sons.
Even though she was in hospice care, Kim devoted her remaining three months on this earth to writing personal notes to our children, ordering their holiday and birthday presents, and visiting with friends and family. She made a point of talking with our sons about their hopes and dreams and told them she would be their guardian angel in heaven watching over them.
Kim had an endless amount of love for me and our sons. Above all else, she loved being a wife and mom. She could turn even the most mundane family activity into something special.
Sitting next to Kim in her bed, I caught her up on our friends and the children’s schoolwork and outside activities. Knowing deep down these would be our last moments together and desperately not wanting it to end, I deliberately stretched out my commentary and took my time. I then gently told Kim it was OK to go when she was ready, that she had prepared me to raise our sons, and I would honor her memory by doing as she would have wished. When I had said those words a few days earlier, she had squeezed my hand in recognition.
I stayed in the room alone with Kim after she passed away. As I kissed her and told her I loved her, my mind was flush with memories: of our wedding, of how she made me a father when she gave life to our elder son, the single most joyful day of my life, and of her stunningly gorgeous smile. The image of her taking her final breaths brought me back to the nightmarish present. While driving home from the hospice facility to comfort our sons, I continued to hear her labored breathing as if a cassette tape lodged in my brain were on incessant replay.
When I’m asked these days, fairly often now that I’m retired, about the best thing I ever did at the CIA, the answer is definitely not some cloak-and-dagger espionage operation. It was meeting Kim in the most consequential chance encounter when she was randomly chosen as the agency disguise technician to prepare me for an overseas assignment. Before working at the CIA, Kim owned a beauty salon, which she sold after 9/11 because she wanted to serve our nation.
My overriding emotion, especially when my sons and I observe the day of Kim’s passing, is gratitude.
The most precious thing we have is time, and I’ll be forever thankful for every moment Kim and I spent together, in health and in sickness.
I’m thankful for our children, who poignantly remind me of Kim. I often tell my sons, especially after they excel in school or on the sports field, “The best thing I ever did for you was to marry your mom.”
I’m thankful for this opportunity to break from opining on the myriad national security threats to our nation and our world to train my focus on what matters most: remembering the amazing woman my sons and I lost far too soon.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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