A painful blessing

In my life, I am blessed. I have many people to love me. I have a mom, 2 dads, a step mom and a step dad, as well as many sisters and brothers. Today, with great sorrow, I said goodbye to one of those dads.
The story of my fathers is inconsequential, but for the sake of confusion, I have my biological dad, my dad who raised me and my step dad, who loves me like his own. It's a blessing combined to have the three of them.
Three months ago, the very last thing I would have thought was that right now we'd be preparing for a funeral. Two months ago, I was preparing to have 2 years left to spend with my biological father, and 2 weeks ago, I began to tell him goodbye, b/c we found out that we only had weeks.
The blessing of having many people to love you is that you feel so supported in every sadness of your life. If only it could make the pain less, is all I keep thinking.
My biological father was who he was. He was a loving, groucy, country, fishing, beer loving, hammer swinging man. He was not perfect, and neither am I. He did love me, and I will always love him, nothing could ever change that. The pain the he endured hurt me more than anything in my life, and when our prayers of his passing on Friday morning around 5 am were finally answered, I felt as though God had lifted a huge weight off of my heart.
My heart hurts for me now, but not for him. He no longer hurts, he's not longer agonizing to breathe, no longer can his body betray him. I can see him in my mind, sitting with my Gramps, perhaps wondering where in Heaven you can get Busch....
My mind can't help but wander forward to the days that will be to come, how I will feel as the pain of watching him pass goes away and the pain of missing him fills that void. I have vowed to remember all of the good times, have long forgiven any bad, and will teach my children about their Gramps right along side loving their PawPaw Bill and PawPaw Ray. The final moment that they spent with him he was able to pull from somewhere in his tortured body a smile a laugh and some comfort for them, so they will not remember him in pain.
I pray for my stepmom, for all my brothers and sisters. I stand proud of my brother Robert, who I had always seen as a child. He stood strong for his mother and our sister, and gave them the strenght they needed. I'm proud to call him my brother. I pray for closure for all of us. He was a man with many children, may each of them carry a happy memory of him to their own children as they grow.
I ask that you pray along with me for those he left behind, but rejoice with me that God has taken his child away from this painful life into a life of everlasting Glory and painlessness. May we meet again some day, all of us, past a rainbow in the sky, and live forevermore.