In the halls of Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas Friday morning, time seemed to stand still as doctors, nurses and patients lined the halls for a hero’s final farewell.
After an eight-year battle with brain cancer, Marine veteran William Preston Moore said his goodbyes.
His wife Sarah said he’d dealt with two different occurrences of medulloblastoma, a cancer few adults get and only 40% survive.
After multiple brain surgeries, and most recently a bone marrow transplant, Moore was in remission. But it weakened his immune system, which allowed pneumonia to strike.
“We went in and he just wasn’t doing well. He was tired. He was having labored breathing. He just looked at me, and I knew. It was done,” Sarah said.
When that time came, she turned to the nurses and doctors her family had leaned on for so long and made one final request.
She said she wanted to send her hero off with an Honor Walk. Within an hour, the hospital had four Marines ready to perform a flag ceremony, escort his body and give him one final salute.
“It was nurses from our first stay at the beginning of the year and doctors we had worked with and even patients who came out,” Sarah said.
It was a moment that provided not only respect for her husband, but support for the family he left behind.
“It was a really good thing for my kids to get to see that this is what their dad is… that he really is a hero not just because I say so, but that other people really believed it too,” Sarah said.
