The Tennessee Santa Claus who could not hold back his tears when he recalled a terminally ill boy’s last words.

“Santa can you help me?” the boy asked before dying in the arms of Eric Schmitt-Matzen, who visited the boy after hearing he requested to meet Father Christmas.

Mr Schmitt-Matzen, 60, is the spitting image of Santa Claus, with his long white beard and handlebar mustache. A mechanical engineer by trade, Mr Matzen will never get too far without a child recognising him as their holiday hero.

But when he met the boy at the local hospital after a nurse called him and requested his immediate presence, Mr Schmitt-Matzen had to work extra hard to stay in character.

“My job was to make sure that he got Christmas,” he told ABC affiliate WHAS. “That’s got to be happy and that’s got to be a fun time, you know? Hard to do when your family members are just, they’re in a bad way right now.”

He requested that any family members who were “going to lose it” stay in the hallway. And when he met the child, he went right into character.

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“What’s this I hear you’re gonna be missing Christmas this year?” Mr Schmitt-Matzen said, speaking to the boy who was too tired and weak to move much. “We’ll you’re not going to miss Christmas! The elves already had your present already made!’

The boy told Mr Scmitt-Matzen that he was dying and was not sure about the afterlife.

“Can you do me a favor?” Mr Schmitt-Matzen responded. “When you get up to those Pearly Gates, just tell them you’re Santa’s number one elf! ‘I am?’ Sure are. I’m sure they’ll let you in. ‘They will?’ I said I know it. He just came up and gave me a big hug”

“He just kind of looked up at me and said ‘Santa can you help me’... And that’s when he passed,” he added. “I looked back to the window that’s when the mother started yelling and screaming, ‘No, no, not yet’.”

A veteran of the US Army’s elite Ranger unit, Mr Schmitt-Matzen said he ran off after the boy died, “bawling my head off”. He said he was a “basket case for three days”.

“It took me a week or two to stop thinking about it all the time,” he said. “Actually, I thought I might crack up and never be able to play the part again.”

Despite how the visit ended that day, Mr Schmitt-Matzen could be sure the boy got his final wish.