CHAPTER 12 
I’ll never have enough time to paint all the pictures I want to.
—NORMAN ROCKWELL
On a bright and sunny Good Friday morning, April 6, 2012, Amy Pinto-Walsh called 911. According to news sources, she told the emergency dispatch operator that she was with Thomas Kinkade, and he had been drinking all night and wasn’t breathing.
A Santa Clara county ambulance arrived at the house at 11:16 A.M., where the emergency technician found Thom in his bed, not breathing, not moving. He began CPR, but couldn’t revive him.
Nanette was out of the country, traveling with her four daughters in Australia at the time. Ken was the nearest friend who could be contacted. He rushed over immediately.
Ken pulled up at the Monte Sereno house in his BMW, not long after the ambulance had arrived. He rushed inside as his wife, Linda, followed. The house seemed empty and surreal, except for a commotion heard upstairs. Ken didn’t see Amy Pinto anywhere. Linda went to check on Amy, and Ken headed upstairs to the master bedroom. Thom lay stretched out on the bed, the EMTs attending to his body. Ken stood in the room taking in the hard reality of seeing his dead friend lying before him. The EMTs looked at Ken with sympathy.
“I’m sorry. He’s gone,” one of them said.
Ken neared the bed as tears formed in his eyes. They asked him to identify the body, and he did.
We had all known Thom’s death was not only possible, but most likely to happen, given the severity of his progressive alcoholism. But it was still a shock to Ken, who had hoped it wouldn’t come to pass.
The coroner arrived, examined the body, and wrote up a report. When he was done, the EMTs prepared the body and the stretcher to move Thom out of the house and into the ambulance. Ken came over to them and helped lift his friend’s body onto the stretcher. He followed the body all the way out to the ambulance, staying with Thom as long as he could.
While Linda waited downstairs, she walked through the quiet rooms, past pictures of Thom’s daughters, all of whom were her godchildren. How many happy moments had they experienced together over the years? How devastated would the girls and Nanette be when they heard?
Amy later spoke to the San Jose Mercury News, saying that Thom “died in his sleep, very happy, in the house he built, with the paintings he loved, and the woman he loved.”
Ken helped to load Thom’s body into the ambulance and watched the EMTs close the door with a heavy heart. In tears, he said a silent goodbye to the man with the great appetite. His appetite had finally killed him.