The wife and daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wrote heartbreaking tributes to the lawmaker hours after his death on Saturday.
Cindy McCain, the senator’s wife of 38 years, expressed her grief on Twitter.
“My heart is broken,” she wrote. “He passed the way he lived, on his own terms; surrounded by the people he loved, in the place he loved best.”
Meghan McCain, the senator’s 33-year-old daughter, wrote an emotional statement thanking her father for being a hero to both her and the country.
“I was with my father at his end, as he was with me at my beginning,” she wrote. “In the thirty-three years we shared together, he raised me, taught me, corrected me, comforted me, encouraged me and supported me in all things.”
“His love and his care, ever present, always unfailing, took me from a girl to a woman,” she said. “And he showed me what it is to be a man.”
Meghan McCain, a co-host of “The View,” was fiercely loyal to her father. She defended him on her show, in interviews and on Twitter as President Donald Trump and his allies hurled insults at the senator over differing political views.
In May, after a White House aide mocked John McCain, who had cancer, by reportedly saying, “It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyways,” Meghan McCain snapped back.
“Don’t feel bad for me or for my family,” she said on her show. “We’re really strong.”
Months before his death, McCain reportedly asked his son-in-law Ben Domenech to “take care of Meghan.”
Meghan McCain said Saturday that she and her family will continue to live out her father’s legacy.
“He was a great fire who burned bright, and we lived in his light and warmth for so very long,” she wrote. “We know that his flame lives on, in each of us.”