I got the word early Wednesday morning from Cathy that Rob's conditioned had worsened, and he was going to die soon. I was able to speak words of gratitude and blessing over the phone to Rob as Cathy held it up to his ear, and he smiled. Lorie and I jumped on a plane and flew out to Reno, NV, that afternoon and met up with my other brother Bill who flew in from Atlanta. We arrived at midnight, 3 hours after Rob had passed. But we got to spend some time with him and reminisce and express our love before they took his body away. And we stayed on with Cathy for a couple of days and helped her make plans for the next steps before returning to Winston-Salem.
Several remarkable things happened the day Rob died. Earlier in the day, he kept pointing to the wall in his bedroom and said, “It’s amazing!” over and over. At one point, Cathy asked, “Do you see people?” He nodded yes, and then counted out the number 6 on his fingers. (I wonder who they were.) And just before he died, he sat up, opened his eyes and looked at Cathy, then laid back and breathed his last. He died very peacefully.
Last week I asked Rob if he had any fears about dying. He answered by saying, “I like what Woody Allen once said. When asked about it, he said, ‘I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’” We both laughed. Then he got more serious and told me, “I’m ready.”
My brother was a remarkable man in so many ways. Creative, caring, funny, genius, futurist, pioneer, musical, generous, loving, loyal, faithful, and faith-filled – these are some of the words I would use to describe him. He won an Emmy for a documentary he produced and directed in Atlanta back in the 1970s. He was on the ground floor of launching CNN back in the early 80s and became their first MIS director. He worked for Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino for a decade and was on the team that developed the Newton, a forerunner to the iPhone. Then he left the corporate world and returned to his original love and became an artist. He had a huge influence on my life.
One of the last paintings Rob did is one of my favorites. It’s called “Facing Death Valley.” Rob painted himself standing in the middle of Death Valley looking to the future. It’s dry and dusty and barren. It looks like the place has been in a drought forever. And there he is facing the future and the prospect of death, in a place without any water…with an umbrella in his hand! Now that’s faith! He believed good things were coming.
The day before he died he said, “I don’t know what it was like before I was born. And I don’t really know what it’s going to be like after I die. But I know it will be something, and I believe by faith it’s going to be great.” Rob looked forward to going home. But I’m sure going to miss him.
When a loved one dies, your faith becomes all the more real and all the more important to you. You find out what you really believe, and you discover whether or not your faith in Christ is strong enough to hold you. And you discover it is.
The last night Lorie and I were with Cathy and my brother Bill in Reno, I read to them an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ book The Last Battle, which is the last of the seven books in his children’s classic series The Chronicles of Narnia. I want to share them with you, too. It speaks of our hope of heaven.
“And as [Aslan] spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”