He was in a wheelchair on his way to Portugal with my mother. He could barely breathe. The cancer had caught up with emphysema, one failing system on top of another.
I pushed him through the terminal doors.
And the last real words he said to me, just before they went through security, were "Look after your mom."
I've thought about those words for eighteen years now. He was the one leaving in a wheelchair. Even then it seemed likely he would not be coming home the way he was traveling out.
And his last message to me was still to do something for someone else.
Between his diagnosis and his death he never once asked me to do anything for him, or even asked me what it had been like to be his son.
We barely knew each other before his diagnosis. I would call the house and ask for my mother; he would answer, get through maybe two sentences with me, and hand the phone over. For years this was the entire arc of the relationship.
He would pay for …