Former Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) lay dying, partially paralyzed after a recent stroke and a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, when he gathered his wife and son around his hospital bed.

“Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” he asked them, according to a Wednesday report from the Daily Beast.

His son and wife both told the site Bennett said, “I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump.”

Bennett, a veteran senator swept out of office in 2010 by Tea Party favorite Mike Lee, was deeply troubled by Trump’s rise to prominence in his party, Joyce Bennett told the Beast.

His family said Bennett, nearing the end of his life, felt an urgent desire to redress the rhetoric about Muslims during the 2016 election cycle and was particularly disturbed by Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration.

“In the last days of his life this was an issue that was pressing in his mind…disgust for Donald Trump’s xenophobia,” Bennett’s son, Jim, told the site. “At the end of his life he was preoccupied with getting things done that he had felt was left undone.”

While traveling home to Utah for Christmas, Bennett’s wife said he approached a woman wearing a hijab in the airport to “apologize on behalf of the Republican Party.”

“He would go to people with the hijab [on] and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here,” Joyce Bennett told the site.

Bennett’s Mormon faith keenly informed his feelings about Trump’s policy plans, and his son said he recognized “the parallel between the Mormon experience and the Muslim experience.”

Bennett died May 4 at the age of 82.