R.I.P. Dr. Don Jay Hunter

The first message ever posted on this site was a note of remembrance I posted for one of my great friends and teachers, Janet Macy. Today I find myself in a similar place as I did just over a year ago. One of my greatest teachers in life, and a man who has had a profound impact on the person I am and hope to be, is gone.

Dr. Don Hunter passed away today at the age of 92. His wife of almost seventy years and two of his three children were by his side in his hospital room. For those of us who loved and respected him this moment was bittersweet and overdue, as his incredibly sharp mind had been trapped in a rapidly deteriorating body since his fall on Christmas day. I was on my way to visit with him when I got the call to let me know that he was finally out of pain.

By the time I was born a massive stroke had reduced Don to quite literally half the man he had been. With paralysis on his right side he could no longer hunt, hike, golf, or practice medicine anymore. In all these categories, and many more, he had excelled. Even in this state he had a strength rarely encountered, and to know him was to be impressed by it. He is the only person I could actually feel walk into a room. It was as if who he was didn’t fit into the broken body in which he was supposed to reside, and his spirit permeated his surroundings.

In defiance of all odds and expectations he outlived his brother and sister, and on more than one occasion fought off his own impending death with a fortitude and swagger that demonstrated a life force I will never see matched. We would joke that he was made out of granite and leather and would probably outlive us all. He had the face of a much younger man. As my mother once said, “Don doesn’t get wrinkles, he gives them.”

Inside this tall, broad shouldered man was an intensity and stubbornness that intimidated most people around him. Behind his white beard lived a wry smile mocking the comparable ignorance of most people surrounding him. Behind his eyes that had seen so much was a mind that remembered it all, and could recall with advantages the slightest detail or nuance from his life.

He was the only doctor I would go to for some time, even when he had stopped practicing medicine. I remember the day he mocked me for breaking my wrist. He knew I had inherited his toughness and a broken arm could be a laughing matter between us. He was a brilliant diagnostician who on more than one occasion out-diagnosed the hospital to which he had been admitted. He didn’t need to see test results to know exactly what was wrong with him. He was the smartest person in just about any room he ever sat in, and we all knew it.

There was a goodness in him, an inherent trust of humanity that made him a wonderful doctor and a horrible business man. His strength of character protected a tenderness that when grazed reacted as if to fire. He was a man of tenacity and ethics, a man of strength and wisdom. He was a rare combination of traits and excellence rarely found in even a handful of men. Don Hunter was by all accounts a complex and impressive human being that I am forever changed for knowing.

Today the streets of heaven are filled with angels anxiously awaiting his insights and looking forward to his strong minded opinions. Today Don is playing golf with the masters and finally working on his own late-swing-wrist-snap, finding he was correct about the extra 30 yards he expected to get out of it. Right now there are scores of people listening to Don question their intake of triglycerides and saturated fats, and he is interrupted only by phone calls from people telling him that his risky investment worked and that they will be by very soon with a bag of money for his loved ones. The heavens got just a little bit bigger today, swelling to accommodate for the soul now occupying so much of its precious real estate. And today, his family is happy for Don, and for the first time feeling the lack of him in this world.

I love you grandpa…