Meghan McCain Shares Emotional Tribute to Late Father John McCain
John McCain—Republican senator, former POW, and two-time presidential candidate—has died after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was 81.
“Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4:28 p.m. on August 25, 2018,” his office said in a statement. On Thursday, McCain’s family revealed he was discontinuing treatment.
Minutes after the news broke online, the senator’s daughter Meghan McCain, 33, released her own statement on Twitter, writing that she “was with him at his end, as he was with me at my beginning.” She concluded with a C.S. Lewis quote, from the author’s 1956 children’s fantasy novel The Last Battle: “The dream is ended: This is the morning.”
Read her entire statement below:
The View co-host has been open about the hardship of dealing with an ill parent. “I’m not the same person I was when my dad was first diagnosed,” she told Glamour earlier this month. “My father is the sun in my universe … He’s the absolute center.”
In July 2017, McCain revealed that he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer that watchers of American politics know well—the same disease killed Senator Ted Kennedy and Beau Biden, the oldest son of former vice president Joe Biden. Meghan McCain told Glamour she joined her father——publicly nicknamed “The Maverick” at doctor visits, waking up at 5 a.m. for his radiation appointments and had no intention of taking the View gig when it came her way. It was her father who insisted she go for it, saying she’d be “insane to pass it up.”
PHOTO: Dimitrios Kambouris
In Apri 2018, McCain was back in the hospital, and Meghan said doctors warned her it was time to initiate any conversations she needed to have with her father, though she hesitated. “We’ve done that,” she told her dad’s team. “He knows I love him more than anything, and I know he loves me more than anything. There’s nothing else. What’s next?”
Talking to Glamour, Megan also was forthcoming about how she, her father’s only daughter, received no special treatment growing up; the Maverick had been as strict with her as he was with her brothers. Why hadn’t she been given status—a daughter’s reprieve? But his relentlessness, she knows, made her resilient. “I realize now he did it so I could survive this.”