Marvin Ash was on the phone with Nebraska police telling him about his daughter's accidental death when word came down the hospital hallway that his wife was dead, too.
"It was unbearable," Ash said after the double funeral Friday. "It didn't sink in for five hours. Then I knew it was real. Both gone."Ash, 53, was stroking his wife's forehead, kissing her and saying he loved her as she lay dying at St. Agnes Medical Center on Aug. 14. Mary Louise Ash, 52, the mother of his four children, had liver and kidney disease.
The Fresno truck driver said he knew his wife was slipping away. A hospital chaplain interrupted, saying he was wanted on the phone.
A Lincoln, Neb., police officer told him that his daughter, Nicki Larrine Ash, 28, died in a motorcycle crash earlier that day.
His reaction was disbelief. While he was still on the phone, he learned that his wife had died. Since then, Ash has given a lot of thought to a conversation he had with his daughter two days earlier.
"She said she dreamed everything would be all right with her mother . . . and that she would see her soon," he said, voice cracking. "It was heaven. She was going to see her mother in heaven."