I was just the newest thing he’d decided to keep alive.

I keep comparing him, in my mind, to the men I spent my career around, because the comparison teaches me something I am still learning.

I knew a great many important men.

I sat in rooms with hospital executives and department chiefs, men whose authority was real and whose decisions moved millions of dollars and touched thousands of lives.

And almost none of them had what Sal had, which I can only call standing — the kind you cannot be appointed to, that no title confers, that comes instead from four decades of showing up in the same place and being, without fail, the person who could be counted on.

The executives’ authority ended at the parking lot; take away their office and their org chart and they were only tired men in expensive coats.