She just wanted to make the final moments of her dying husband sweet and happy, so she poured all her love in this hauntingly beautiful rendition of his favorite hymn.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on January 10, 2020. It has since been updated.
It can be extremely difficult to watch the one you love slowly slip away, knowing that the time you have with them is limited. But you also know that you want to make the little time you have with them memorable so you do everything you can to cheer them up and have them happy. And that is exactly what one loving wife wanted to do for her dying husband. For 31-year-old Danielle Gibson, watching her husband, Tony, suffer from a rare disease had left her helpless and devastated.
It all started in December 2017, when after the birth of their second set of twins, the 33-year-old father began losing his memory rapidly, reported Metro UK. It had gotten so bad, she had to take to labelling everything in their house until he couldn't recall anymore. He had even forgotten that he was raising four children with Danielle. Suspecting dementia, the worried wife took him to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, US, where after a month of tests, neurologists said that he was suffering from the degenerative brain disorder.
In fact, they had diagnosed him with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a disease caused by the same infectious proteins that cause the mad cow disease in animals. It's a rare condition, but it comes from eating contaminated meat. Once they found out what it is he had, the couple were told that he would have barely a year to live in the best case scenario. Within that year where he had been moved into an around-the-clock nursing home, his health began deteriorating rapidly.
Danielle told Daily Mail that the final two months of her beloved's life were marred even more with his inability to walk, talk or even eat. "He was having trouble swallowing in the last week. It got to where he would refuse anything and shake his head: 'No'," she said. "The doctors told me it was just the process of the body shutting down. It was so hard to see because Tony is so strong; he's such a big guy."
She had even launched an appeal on GoFundMe to help raise money for his medical care. She wrote at the time, "He lost his job due to not being able to perform tasks and has no life insurance so I’m not sure how I will be able to afford what he needs. It is difficult enough raising two sets of twin girls with barely any income. Any donation would be a blessing."
And just three days before he passed away, the heartbroken wife sang a beautiful rendition of his favorite hymn, Amazing Grace in a video that later went viral on Facebook.
On January 30, 2019, Danielle had to say goodbye to the love of her life. The heartbroken mother and wife thought she was prepared for it but she wasn't. "The hospice nurse tried to tell me it would get worse after he passed," she said. "I told her that I thought it wasn't the case because for the past year I felt he was already gone. But she was right; you can't prepare yourself for this."
Wanting something worthwhile to come of his passing, she donated his brain to the CJD Foundation in the hope it will help find a cure for the disease that took him away, and keep other families from going through the pain she had to suffer. She said, "Everything reminds me of him, every time I look at our babies, it's so hard."
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