Man’s Daughter, Wife Die Same Day

FRESNO —  Marvin Ash was on the phone with Nebraska police telling him about his daughter’s accidental death when word came down the hospital hallway that his wife was dead, too.

“It was unbearable,” Ash said after the double funeral on Friday. “My God. It didn’t sink in for five hours. Then I knew it was real. Both gone.”

Ash, 53, was stroking his wife’s forehead as she lay dying at St. Agnes Medical Center on Aug. 14. Mary Louise Ash, 52, the mother of their four children, had liver and kidney disease.

Then a hospital chaplain interrupted, saying he was wanted on the phone.

A Lincoln, Neb., police officer told him that his daughter, Nicki Larrine Ash, 28, died in a motorcycle crash earlier that day.

While he was on the phone, he learned that his wife had died. Since then, Ash has given a lot of thought to a conversation he had with his daughter two days earlier.

“She said she dreamed everything would be all right with her mother . . . and that she would see her soon. I didn’t know how to interpret that, but now I do,” he said.

“It was heaven. She was going to see her mother in heaven.”