Help, please: Did my dad have COPD?

Hi, I decided to post here because I lost my 60 year old dad 3 weeks ago, and I am trying to understand or make sense of it, if anyone, either doctor or patient can help me, please! My dad had COPD?!

The doctors who tried to save my dad said it was flare up COPD.

At the time he passed away on a Wednesday morning, I was not there. Apparently dad was having trouble breathing, mom called an ambulance, the doctors came, the heart was fine, it was the lungs, they put him on an oxygen mask, they were going to move him to the hospital, but it was too late, he was gone.

From the end of last year Dad started to have a chronic, constant cough. I told him to get it checked out but he said it was allergies. The cough continued until this year, morning, noon, night. The only times he didn't cough was when he slept, although he would occasionally cough in his sleep.
These last few months he was constantly clearing his throat, loudly (the volume of his coughing and clearing could be heard from far away).
Also earlier this year he began to run out of breath after walking a few blocks, when running errands. The last few months it was common for him to come in from running an errand (a few blocks from home) and be heard straining for breath, he would stay like that for a little while, holding on to the table or a chair, until it would pass and he would go on with his normal life.

The reason why dad minimized it is because he had an accident when he was 19 years old, and it caused a diagragmatic paralysis on his right side; when my mom told him a few weeks ago "it can't be that you are like this, that you are out of breath" my dad said "my lungs are fine, it's the diaphragm"....
I had less lung capacity per se, because of this.

My dad smoked quite a lot, I think maybe 2 packs a day minimum, especially in his forties, and these last two years he became completely sedentary because of other diseases like type 2 diabetes, psoriatic arthritis, spondylitis aquinosa, different impingements in the spine, lumbalgia, fibromyalgia, fatty liver, etc. He took a lot of medication, lived with pain all the time, years ago, so physical exercise was always a complicated issue. He started smoking since he was 20 years old I think, so he must have smoked for about 40 years.

My uncle (his brother) also smoked a lot and died a couple of years ago of COPD because he refused to stop smoking. He had a similar episode to my dad, one day he called him on the phone saying he couldn't breathe and my dad drove him to the hospital as fast as he could. They intubated him but apparently it was too late too, and he left.

After my uncle died of COPD my dad continued to smoke just the same, he would get angry if anyone said anything to him about it. He used to say "anything will kill me before smoking".

This year a cardiologist told him to "stop smoking" but Dad didn't listen.
My dad was going to the doctors, in fact a few weeks before he had a chest x-ray, but he didn't ask for the report. The problem is that he didn't go for a spirometry. We found with mom the other day a doctor's order for a spirometry from 2014, the diagnosis (i.e. the reason to validate the study, said COPD) but dad never had the study done, and this year, since these episodes, neither, so we have no way of knowing if he had it or not.

I just want to understand, it happened so fast, does this sound like he had undiagnosed COPD?

From what I've read on the internet, he had the symptoms: shortness of breath after certain normal activities, constant cough that wouldn't go away, and mucus. But still, it was so sudden that I need to understand, it's something that's going around in my mind constantly, if anyone could tell me their opinion I would greatly appreciate it.