“I want you all to continue to fish,” Tim Hartley told his family on June 22, the day he died.

It was hot already as the sun rose on his final morning. His loved ones sat in the grass before him, huddled in the shade of an RV parked outside a Douglas County farmhouse. They chuckled at his instructions.

It was a bit of levity on a strange and heavy day. Maybe he would be reborn as a trout, the avid angler had told his niece a day earlier. Reincarnation, he decided, was still on the table.

“One of these days, a fish is going to come up and look at you and say, ‘Hey Bella, this is Uncle Tim!’” he had joked.

Hartley had lived with cancer in his bones for a year.

The pain had grown worse. The medication had turned his stomach and cast a fog over his mind. He had done what he could to fight

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