David Deutchman was 86 years old when cancer took him, just two and a half weeks after his diagnosis.
Before that, for nearly 15 years, this grandfather from Atlanta, Georgia, had turned his retirement into a quiet mission: sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit at Scottish Rite hospital and holding premature babies who had no one to hold them.
He was neither a doctor nor a nurse. He was simply a man who, after 41 years in sales, decided that his free time was more valuable if he spent it with the smallest and most fragile.
Joanna Slade, a nurse who worked alongside him for eight years, said she never saw a baby cry in his arms.
When his story went viral in 2017, the whole world came to know the ‘intensive care grandpa’.
And when he died in November 2020, the entire community organized a caravan to say goodbye to him outside his home, alongside his wife Ronnie, with whom he shared 58 years of marriage, and his daughters Susan and Jill.