MAPLEWOOD, N.J. (Reuters) - An 80-year-old man who told his family he would drive himself to the funeral home to die did just that, his wife said on Tuesday. Funeral home workers found Harold Saber, a pharmacist and war veteran from Verona, New Jersey, dead on Saturday slumped over in his car in the parking lot of the Bernheim-Apter-Goldsticker Suburban Funeral Chapel in Maplewood, New Jersey, a few miles from his home. ``He said many times he would do that,'' Saber's wife Sylvia Robinson told Reuters. ``He never wanted to bother anybody. He felt evidently it was his time and he drove himself there. ... It was a heroic act of love,'' she said. The cause of death was not yet known, but Robinson said her husband had been seriously ill for years with diabetes, heart problems and high blood pressure. Friday night he could not catch his breath and vowed he would not go back into the hospital where he had spent most of the summer and had several toes amputated. Diabetics often suffer from poor circulation, especially in the extremities. He was gone when his wife awoke on Saturday. A doorman said he saw Saber drive away in the family's 1991 Oldsmobile. At the funeral home, employees called emergency medical technicians and a medical examiner, who pronounced the man dead just after 11 a.m., Maplewood Police Chief Robert Cimino said. There was nothing suspicious about the death, which appears to have been from natural causes, Cimino said. ``This was a such a nice, quiet man,'' Robinson said.
