He was the kind of man who offered you the last slice of pizza, the coziest blanket on a chilly evening, and the strongest umbrella when the rain poured down. People often remarked that his heart was too big, and as it turned out, they were right.
At first, it started with a subtle tiredness. He began to sit down more frequently, leaning against walls while waiting in lines. He brushed it off as age, as the weather, as nothing at all. But we noticed how his shoes seemed to tighten by evening, the way he paused to catch his breath after tying them, and how he stopped singing along to the music in the car.

Then came the quiet and clinical diagnosis: “Congestive heart failure.” It sounded as if it could be managed, something you could live with. However, living with it felt like drowning slowly in his own body, a constant struggle as fluid pooled where he once found breath.
He despised the machines surrounding him, the pills lined up like little soldiers on the kitchen counter, the daily weigh-ins that felt like a countdown to an uncertain future. Salt became a foe, as did stairs.

Yet, despite it all, he continued to smile, to tell jokes, and to ask if we were okay. Even when we found him on the bathroom floor, dizzy and soaked in sweat. Even during the blurred ER visits. Even when the doctors said, “He’s stable, for now.”

He lived as if he weren’t dying, until he could no longer sustain that facade. Yet, even then, he showed us how to love louder than fear, how to keep moving on tired legs, and how to allow a failing heart to still feel full.