I learned this weekend how strong one can become when they have to fight for everything in their lives. At the first meeting, almost everyone saw him as weak, dependent, incapable. He proved them all wrong in the end. Once his physical supports were gone and all he had was his will to keep up the inflating and deflating that kept him here, kept him alive, his strength shone. The strength garnered by years of fighting, of trying, of needing to push for the simplest of things.

He held on much longer than anyone would have predicted, those of us that would have thought him weak. How could a fragile body sustain itself for long? But it wasn’t about his body, not now. Now it was about his inner strength alone. Not necessarily the will to live, but the will to keep on and keep fighting, probably because that was all he had done during his life. He wasn’t born a fighter, no one is, but he became one, fiercely denying the loss of his physical supports one by one until finally science won out over heart.

He was stronger than me, and I see it more clearly now. Let no one say he was weak. His lungs weren’t as strong as mine and his heartbeat was weaker, but this weekend I realized that was never the source of his strength anyways. It’s a lot deeper, a lot harder to define and we may never know the true measure of it until the final hours when we are faced with the biggest choice to let go or hang on. A lifetime of fighting made him the strongest man I have ever met.