I was looking at a fallen giant.

My father and I were standing in an upstairs bedroom of a two story home in the suburbs of New Jersey, and what we were struggling to process was the sight of a man who had loomed so large in our lives, almost to a position beyond legend, laying in a hospital bed with his body punctuated and webbed in tubes and wires.

This was a man who had fought in a war, a man who had built businesses and homes with his own two hands. He was a man whose handshake was armored in calluses from construction, gardening, and a lifetime of squeezing a firearm’s trigger.

No matter how large he was in our minds, the husk before us was tiny, frail, trembling, faint, and fading. His time on this plane of existence was coming to an end, and we could feel it.

But my grandfather’s eyes, those still had a keen light. They were the hunter’s eyes, the soldier’s eyes, the eyes of a man who had seen opportunity from a distance, and waited patiently for it to drift into his crosshairs. And they were fixed on me.

Suddenly he was fighting against the tubes and the wires, struggling to sit up, with those eyes still pinning me in place. My father, who had entered the room ahead of me and stood a few feet closer to the bed, placed a thick and heavy hand on that frail and heaving ribcage, and pressed down with just enough weight that my grandfather realized he couldn’t escape his bed. Maybe he even realized that he would never escape it, never feel his feet on solid ground again, never stand unassisted, never walk under his own power.

The intense expression on his face was replaced with something I had never seen there, helplessness and sadness. He looked at my father suddenly, placing his thick fingers on the back of dad’s hand, and – as if to explain the sudden commotion in the room just a few seconds ago – said something in accented English as he tilted his head in my direction.

If I could help him, I would.

Here was a man more than halfway on his journey to transition to whatever there is beyond the mortal world, a man with machines helping his every bodily function and other machines whose sole purpose was to alert us when that body would inevitably fail to tether him to our world, and HE wanted to help ME.

I was twenty-five, an active martial artist, attending art school, in many ways in the prime of my youth and the promise of an unwritten future. I started questioning what about the way I looked made him want to help me?

“Dad,” my father said with practiced enunciation and patience, “this is your grandson Mark. This is my son.”

Grandpa turned back and fixed me again with those intense hunter’s eyes. Whatever Alzheimer’s disease had taken from his memory and personality, the steel in his expression was still there, lingering.

“He…” my father was at an uncharacteristic loss for words. He was trying to find a way to communicate something primal, some way to indicate the connection between three generations of men when one of them had lost so many memories and the point of reference that those memories provide. “Dad, he’s like us. He makes sauce.”

Whether my grandfather understood the implied meaning, or if my father’s tone reassured him that he no longer needed to get out of his death bed and help me I can never know. Either way, he visibly relaxed in his bed, and let out a costly sigh of breath that had a hitching gurgle at the tail end.

We stood then, in meaningful silence, not verbalizing the memories playing out in our minds as we struggled to rationalize the sight of this man so frail and diminished. There were three generations of us in that room, and there would soon only be two remaining. The roots of our tree would be gone, and whether that tree could withstand the storms and freezes of our family’s future was something that worried us both.

The silence was heavy, maybe heavier than it would be for other men in similar situations, because the culture we shared is one of oral history. Storytellers preserve the past and contextualize the future. Tall tales help us remember the character of our family, and ensure that the legends of each generation continue beyond the moments that their last breaths and words stop filling our ears.

After an eternity of that silence, my father finally spoke.

“Could you leave?”

It took way too long for me to realize my dad was talking to me. I was exhausted and bewildered as I mechanically walked out of the room, plodded down the hallway to the stairs that cornered into the tiny living room where my mom was chatting with my aunt and uncle about trivialities.

“Is everything okay?” my mom’s decades of experience as a nurse colored the question as more distantly professional then the care one might expect of a wife or mother or daughter-in-law.

“They needed to talk,” it was all I could think of to explain why my last moments alone with my grandfather in that inter-generational farewell were cut short. I knew no one would understand the way my father sent me away, out of the presence of a man who seemed deadly focused on helping me from his deathbed.

When I told my Aunt about how the man had attempted to sit up, and said those few poignant words, she became visibly excited.

“English? He said it in English? He hasn’t really spoken in English for a while now. In fact I have been wheeling his bed over to the window so he could try and speak Italian with the neighbor next door.”

He remembered a language he lost. He tried to leave his bed. He struggled against the tubes and the lost memories and the heavy hand of my father. He did this to help me.

But why?

Well, let me tell you a story…