Stacey Knox gains a kidney, but loses her father

Sitting in a Philadelphia hospital bed, Stacey Knox has had plenty of time to reflect on her father's last gift to her.

Anthony Jon Jenkins was attempting to cross Route 40 in New Castle when he was hit by a car and then a pickup truck. He never awoke from the trauma.

“Dad always said, 'You're my kid. I'd give my life for you',” Knox said.

On Aug. 8, he did.

The night of the accident, Knox said, she woke up from a deep sleep to a police officer pounding on the front door of her Kendale Road home. She and her husband, Francis, drove straight to her father's bedside in Christiana Hospital where churning machines were keeping him alive.

Knox spent the next few hours talking to her father in her soft and relaxed way, telling him she loved him. As his only daughter, she said, she knew she would eventually have to make a final decision on his care, a wish he shared with her during better times. “He told me he didn't want to live like that hooked up to machines,” she said.

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