This column, written by LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on June 14, 2026.  

My dad lived his final day last month. 

He reached the age of 80 but celebrated his birthday in a hospital room, a setting he couldn’t escape during his final two months of life.

Life doesn’t end like it does in the movies.

Unless it’s sudden, it’s not a straight line of decline. It’s an erratic path of up and down, hope and heartache, trials and testing, insight and sorrow. For those at the bedside, you see things that you wish you hadn’t. And do things you never thought you would.

Role reversals are tough. In the end, I was doing things for him that he did for me 60 years earlier. Such is the circle of life — and a tight circle it is. It goes around fast.

Big, strong and tough, Don Cunningham Sr. was the last of a generation to come of age during America’s post-WWII industrial manufacturing boom. He walked out of Bethlehem’s Liberty High School into the Ingot Mould Foundry of Bethlehem Steel. He carved out a middle-class living pouring hot metal and building molds until the blast furnaces went silent in 1995. Married by 18, he had two children by 21 and was widowed by 33 when my mom died.

He lived a life of pain and setbacks, but you’d never know it. His best friend killed in Vietnam. A single parent in his 30s. He was the happiest guy in the room. The most optimistic. The most positive.

He developed alopecia in high school, and all his hair fell out. No one knew why. It wasn’t cool to be bald in 1963. It was an early, and yet unidentified, sign of his autoimmune disorder that led to polycystic kidney disease in his 50s and kidney failure by 60.

Two days from dialysis, the amazing gift of a kidney from family friend Louise Kelchner of Bethlehem in 2005 gave him an additional 20 years of life. Despite the challenges of antirejection drugs, which led to skin and colon cancers, diabetes, neuropathy and other limitations, he lived his 60s and 70s like the 20s and 30s he never had. He pushed his way through his medical challenges to maximize his life. He willed himself to live as long as he did. Never complaining.

His retirement to Florida with my stepmom Val was like college for senior citizens. He took up golf, discovered a taste for whiskey, and didn’t let a day get away from him.

People were his main interest. Instantly likeable, he lived in a judgment-free zone and was truly interested in everyone he met. He got to know a person, what they did, how many kids they had, if they played sports and what they liked to do.

People regularly say to me, “I only met your dad once or twice but feel like I’ve known him forever.” You can’t fake sincerity. People see through it. In a world that doesn’t have time, he did. You can’t teach that.

Val, his wife of 42 years, dying suddenly last July was a blow.

His final journey started on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, with an ambulance transport from his retirement community to an emergency room in Fort Myers, Florida. It ended 60 days later, on May 16, at Moravian Village in Bethlehem.

During those two months, he resided in five health care facilities and slept in eight beds in two states. His journey included a medical transport of 1,200 miles to Bethlehem, two emergency room trips, two stints in intensive care units, two skilled nursing centers, two hospice authorizations, and several general hospital beds.

I have no idea what it cost yet. I don’t know if I ever will. But I know it was a lot.

The American Bar Association reports that a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond analysis estimates the average cost of the final three months of life in a hospital is $56,300. Overall spending by all payers including Medicare and private insurance averages $80,000 during the final year of life.

I saw firsthand why it happens. Healthcare providers are trained to save lives and ease pain. And families don’t want to let go of the hope for recovery.

The care my dad received at every facility — the Lee Health Network in Fort Myers, Lehigh Valley Health Network part of Jefferson Health, Moravian Village and St. Luke’s University Health Network Hospice — was excellent.

Managing the healthcare system of insurance approvals, authorizations and facility availabilities can be daunting and like a part-time job, but those who provide care and support — the doctors and nurses, physical and respiratory therapists, nutritionists, nurses’ aides and general staff — are excellent. It takes special people to do that work and they do it well.

People were drawn to my dad, and that was no different in hospitals, although he wasn’t always the ideal patient. Often in pain, tired of being poked and prodded, his goal every day was just to leave, to return to his home, and his friends and family. When he realized that wouldn’t happen, he said to my wife Lynn and I, “It’s time to conclude this,” he said. “I’m not going to get better, and you and your sister can’t keep visiting me here every day and night.”

He asked to go back on hospice care only — no medical intervention, no life-sustaining drugs — and for his phone. The next three days he called all his friends, his siblings and six grandchildren. He didn’t say why. He just talked. He was gone two days later.

In his dying, as in his life, he taught us that what’s necessary is rarely what’s easiest.