On a clear night from the front porch on Gwendolyn's Farm, located high on St. Mary's Ridge above the dairyland town of Norwalk, Wis., the yardlights on dozens of neighboring farms create a 360-degree constellation of stars.

During daylight, the view westward resembles a miniature Grand Canyon — the distant hills form a full-color horizon that looks far beyond Sparta, a nearby town. It's a muggy, windless summer day in Norwalk (population 564), but atop these lush west-central Wisconsin hills there is always a welcoming fresh breeze.

Gwendolyn's Farm — named after the more rambunctious of two resident Great Danes — is where Lon Priddle, knowing that he was dying of colon cancer, came to live.

He embraced the farm, its Amish neighbors and its possibilities as a refuge from his troubles, mainly a 10-year fight over enforcing visitation rights to his three children. In particular, he saw it as a place where he and his youngest son Wyatt could be together. Lon's second wife Soma says, "The essence of Lon's life was to be a father to his children."

In spring 1996, Lon (a travel industry executive) and Soma (a United Airlines pilot) bought a 104-acre dairy farm in which he eventually planted a garden with basil, parsley, rosemary, organic vegetables, and heirloom tomatoes. He also devoured books on farming, maple syrup, cross breeding, and pollination. She says, "He understood the difference between substance and style. He was a substance guy."

His love for the farm was such he told Soma that, after he died, he would signal his presence to her by rustling the pine trees outside the house.

Son Wyatt and Lon share some good times.

"Lon knew that life and death are merely normal phases in God's astounding natural system," said John Dreier, a Norwalk banker and friend who spoke at Lon's memorial service. "Lon knew the meaning of life, as revealed on the farm. Lon's body ultimately yielded to disease in Chicago, but his soul still resides on his beloved farm."

In recent months, much national attention has been focused on death. Certain well-known figures such as the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin and Dr. Roger C. Bone, a nationally known pulmonary physician who died in June, gave the public a fuller appreciation of courage under fire and how to die well.

But a darker image of death comes from the spectacle of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's "medicides" and the physician-assisted suicide debate. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 26 overturned two federal appellate court decisions that permitted assisted suicide. But the issue is expected to be picked up again by the states.

Usually the media frame the assisted suicide debate in terms of polar opposites. Civil libertarians advocate the right to die; religious traditionalists bitterly oppose it. But the legal and political battles rarely touch upon the qualities inherent in a good death, where waiting for the "right time" is more important than managing death.

Yet given some proposed legislative guidelines for assisted suicide — still illegal but under consideration in numerous states — Lon fit some proposed criteria. He was alert, mentally competent, and not clinically depressed. And he wanted to die.

Lon Priddle was not nationally known, but his death is instructive on many levels. Lon's story says a lot about the importance of relationships, living for others and the role of faith at the end of life — even for a confirmed skeptic.

In his last weeks, he raised the most basic of questions faced by the dying: Is there a point to the suffering? Is assisted death an option? What might be the consequences for himself and those he loved? Through the darkness, he learned that if there is a choice in death, it stems from deciding not when to end a life but how death should be faced.

Gwendolyn's Farm, near Norwalk, Wisconsin, was a working dairy farm before the Priddles bought it.

John Dreier says, "From Lon, I really gained some appreciation for patience . . . . and perseverance under fire. It's not what happens to you. It's how you handle it."

In late January, Lon and Soma for the last time visited the farm — Jan. 26 was her 38th birthday and his present to her was a hand corn grinder. At 5-foot-8 and 160 pounds in his prime, Lon was now very weak and he was losing weight. On Feb. 6, he was readmitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago.

Eight days later — on Valentine's Day — Lon Priddle, age 50, lost all hope.

Lon's three children live with Lon's former wife in upstate New York. Soma says Lon, after a divorce, gave up his career as a U.S. Air marketing executive and "all his assets" for what he thought would guarantee his visitation rights, but these rights proved difficult to enforce. Gradually, Lon's hopes and a custody battle centered around Wyatt, then 13 years old (Wyatt has an older brother and sister; attempts to reach Wyatt and his mother Adair in suburban Rochester, N.Y.,were unsuccessful).

Lon and Soma at their 1993 wedding shortly before Lon was diagnosed with cancer.

Lon was not expected to live long. So he had high hopes for a visit from Wyatt, but was devastated when parental politics foiled the court-ordered visit. At the same time, Lon had met with a team from Northwestern's acute palliative care unit (or its hospice), where he was about to be transferred. Barbara Camden, a registered nurse with the hospice unit who also has a master's in pastoral counseling, recalls that in a preliminary meeting, "Lon asked if there was anything we could do to help him die."

The hospice team, in denying the request, realized Lon's suffering was in the "other realms of his existence," namely the need for reconciliation with his children and more time with Soma. Camden counseled patience: "Sometimes the waiting is not about you, but rather someone you love."

Soma remembers vividly the "awful" Valentine's Day. She realized the key to Lon's continuing hope was a visit from Wyatt. But Justice Evelyn Frazee of the New York State Supreme Court (the lowest state court) was on vacation and unreachable.

Later Friday night, Soma went to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago to track down any information she could find on the judge. Through a computer-assisted search of New York State property records, she found the name of the judge's husband (he has a different last name). Startling bleary-eyed students around her at 3 a.m., Soma let out a gleeful shout that a longshoremen would have appreciated.

A separate search yielded the judge's home phone number. Later at home, Soma called the judge, leaving an apologetic message: Lon was dying and needed to see Wyatt, and the judge was the only one on Earth who could help.

Later Saturday morning, she went back to the library and tracked down a list of 115 matching family names where she thought the judge might be vacationing. Returning to the hospital Saturday afternoon — and much to Lon's amazement — Soma hauled out the long list of names and started making phone calls.

Lon perked up. "It was the most intimate moment in our marriage," Soma recalls. "At that moment we both agreed, 'Let's go on and keep fighting.'" And they reminded each other of a slogan that they had adopted early in their marriage when Lon's cancer was first discovered: "We're not dead yet."

On Sunday morning, the justice, who received the message at home, called Soma and asked simply, "What airplane do you want Wyatt on?" He arrived in Chicago later that day.

The story of Lon's last weeks shows "how truth and facts are not the same thing," says Dr. Kathy Johnson Neely, associate medical director of the hospice unit. Part of Lon was tired of the battle, she adds, but another part "was open to exploring the mystery of dying and exploring relationships with his wife and kids. It falls into the line of miraculous for me. If we had complied with his request, what a loss."

On Feb. 20, Lon was transferred to Northwestern's ninth-floor hospice unit. With its mauve-colored walls, it is softer in tone and less frenetic than a typical hospital wing. Most of the 12 beds were unoccupied during a recent visit; there are currently 50 hospice patients at home. The unit has two full-time doctors, social workers, nurse-therapists, chaplains, dietitians, physical therapists, a "bereavement coordinator," and about 100 volunteers.

They pride themselves in "listening skills," and the ability to demonstrate what they call the "soul of medicine." The team even allowed Byron, the gentler of the Great Danes, to visit Lon in the hospice. Says Camden, "We don't promise we can relieve all the pain and suffering, but we can promise we will be there for them."

Before entering the hospice, says Neely, Lon received "good, aggressive, go-for-broke treatment." But the colon cancer had metastasized to the liver and lymph nodes. Since December, he also was on total parenteral nutrition (TPN), which means that all nutrients from fats to amino acids were being fed intravenously. With such a treatment, says Neely, the question always arises: "Are you adding to the quality of life or are you simply extending life?"

Under normal circumstances, Lon would have gone home once his pain was under control, but the farm was too remote and Soma, because of her job, felt he would receive better care in the hospice.

Yet Lon continued to live beyond anyone's expectations, and this will to live was renewed in March when the judge granted him custody of Wyatt. (A decision confirmed by a spokesperson for the New York State Supreme Court.)

Ironically, his body could no longer hold up at the time of a long-awaited court victory. Camden remembers Lon telling her: "'I reached a point in my life that could have been the best for us.' And he had to let go of all of that."

It had been four years since the Rev. John A. Dally, an Episcopal priest and seminary professor from Chicago, had married the Priddles at the Bond Chapel of the University of Chicago. Now, he heard from Soma again. Lon was dying, would he visit? On a sunny Saturday morning, Dally visited Lon alone. He remembers his voice being "unusually strong," and they talked about God, heaven and dying.

"Lon expressed a mixture of skepticism and hopefulness about what lay on the other side of his death,'' recalls Dally. "He shared a vision of heaven with me, a place of serenity in which there was much useful work to be done. I remarked that it sounded like the farm in Wisconsin. He thought for a moment and then agreed that, indeed, the farm was as close to heaven as he'd come on Earth."

Dally also remembers a discussion about planning a memorial service in which Lon delivered a stern warning: "Just don't say I'm in the arms of Jesus." Dally adds: "I knew that behind this comment lay not a contempt for popular sentimental Christianity, but a desire that there be no falsehood connected with the final words on Lon's life."

There was even a final meeting — if not a full reconciliation — with his two older children. Around March 20, Lon had taken a "dramatic turn for the worse," says Soma. "He was delirious. He was having flashbacks." Dally administered the last rites from the Book of Common Prayer. All three children were there, and Lon at last had a chance to tell them all that he loved them.

From Dally's experience, usually the patient sees the last rites as a signal that it's okay to die. But Lon's will to live regularly confounded his family and the hospice staff. Dally says Lon was especially concerned with Wyatt. "Would his son be all right? Would he remember how his father loved him? These questions kept him alive weeks beyond any reasonable expectation."

By April, Lon was doing a lot more sleeping, the intravenous nutritional treatments were cut back, and he was a little confused, "Why am I so weak?" he asked. He was receiving a low dosage of two milligrams of morphine an hour to control the pain. Neely says: "It was clear on the day before he died he was too weak to get physical or occupational therapy. . . . He did not want to eat."

But he seemed at peace. He had received a phone call from Soma and Wyatt saying they had just arrived in Hong Kong. It was a last act of sacrificing for others, according to the family, because Lon had long promised Wyatt the trip to the former British colony before it was turned over to China. Lon, of course, was too ill to make the trip.

Across the world, as Lon was dying, Soma and Wyatt had dinner with friends, then took a starlight walk along Repulse Bay in Hong Kong before retiring to the friends' house.

Soma called Northwestern hospital; Lon had died on April 16. He was alone, but in a place he felt safe and cared for. It was, finally, his time to die.

"Lon's memorial service was exactly what he wanted it to be. No platitudes, no false sentiment, no claims about Lon's new location," says Dally, who officiated at the Bond Chapel service on April 24. The words of the Beatitudes — "Blessed are the poor...." wrap around the walls of the chapel.

Lon embodied the text, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," says Dally. "Throughout his life, he willed the good of those he loved, not in a possessive, cloying way but in a way which set them free."