Dan Hill was the ideal first employee for me to have after my promotion to supervisor. Extremely talented, he seldom had to be told what to do or how to do it. He never questioned my decisions or authority. He never second guessed me. I liked Dan. I knew he liked me. It was easy for everyone else to like Dan. Soft-spoken, he always had an answer for problems they brought to him, and he was an easy guy to deal with. Before long, it became a sure thing that bigger and better positions within the company were in store for Dan. He began, however, experiencing difficulty in performing the physical aspects of his job. Coworkers were quick to step in and take up the slack for him. After, he started having difficulty making it up the stairs to the second floor where our department was located, he was diagnosed as having MS (multiple sclerosis). Normally, someone with an affliction of this nature would have been placed on medical retirement. Dan was adamant in his determination to continue working. His experience and abilities in the non-physical areas of his job made it easy for the company to keep him on. He was moved to an office on the first floor. Never for a moment did he think he was not going to beat his affliction. As day by day I saw his dogged determination to return to his old self, I could not help thinking of a close friend I had watched die within three years of contracting the same disease. After several years Dan reached the point that he could no longer drive to work. Our company installed a PC on the telephone line in his house, and he continued being a vital part of our department without having to leave home. From the conversations and revelry of the occasional lunches our group scheduled at Dan’s house, a stranger would never have suspected he had a problem. He never talked about his condition unless asked about it, then his answers would be without any hint of emotion. Just when we all were beginning to think his sheer determination was going to beat this thing, he began experiencing excruciating pain in his upper chest. His doctor kept insisting the pain was an effect of MS. Months later, when the pain became almost unbearable, he was put in the hospital where tests revealed lung cancer as the source of his pain. By then the cancer had advanced to the stage of being inoperable. Although my tribute to Dan was one of the emotionally hardest poems I have written, it was mentally the easiest. All I had to do was remember the kind of man he was and the words flowed almost as naturally as notes from a violin.