"i'm sorry you're dying"

What else can I say to a man who knows it's almost his time to leave this earth?  What else can I say to someone who just found out they won't make it to their 90th birthday?  What else can I say to a man who has been a huge part of my life?  

"I'm sorry you're dying," is the best I can do.

My Grandpa is dying of cancer.  He just found out a few weeks ago that his body is infested with cancer.  His doctors said it's probably been growing inside of him for 2-3 years.  He found a lump.  He has since found more lumps.

One day he was a happy, healthy 89-year-old man who was looking forward to his 90th birthday.  The next day, he was dying.  

He is not a man of many words.  When I ask him how he's doing, he says "so, so."  That's about all you will get out of him these days.  He has never been one to express his feelings very well, but you know he must be dying inside.  Because he is dying inside!

I found this quote that has brought me comfort over the past month:

If we looked at mortality as the whole of existence, then pain, sorrow, failure, and short life would be calamity.  But if we look upon life as an eternal thing stretching far into the premortal past and on into the eternal post-death future, then all happenings may be put in proper perspective.

Is there not wisdom in his giving us trials that we might rise above them, responsibilities that we might achieve, work to harden our muscles, sorrows to try our souls?  Are we not exposed to temptations to test our strength, sickness that we might learn patience, death that we might be immortalized and glorified?

If all the sick for whom we pray were healed, if all the righteous were protected and the wicked destroyed, the whole program of the Father would be annulled and the basic principle of the gospel, free agency, would be ended.  No man would have to live by faith.  

If joy and peace and rewards were instantaneously given the doer of good, there could be no evil-all would do good but not because of the rightness of doing good.  There would be no test of strength, no development of character, no growth of powers, no free agency, only satanic controls.

Should all prayers be immediately answered according to our selfish desires and our limited understanding, then there would be little or no suffering, sorrow, disappointment, or even death, and if these were not, there would also be no joy, success, resurrection, nor eternal life and godhood.  "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things...righteousness...wickedness...holiness...misery...good...bad..."  (2 Nephi 2:11).

Being human, we would expel from our lives physical pain and mental anguish and assure ourselves of continual ease of comfort, but if we were to close the doors upon sorrow and distress, we might be excluding our greatest friends and benefactors.  Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long-suffering, and self-mastery...

-Spencer W. Kimball