My father lives now in a small house, a former president of a company that bears his own family name and that he no longer has any part in running.

He drives past the headquarters.

He reads about its record quarters in the business pages.

There is no prison guard he can resent, no unjust system he can rail against, no story of persecution he can tell at a bar to sympathetic strangers.

There is only the daily, quiet, permanent fact of what he chose, and what it cost him, sitting across the breakfast table from him every morning of his life.

That is not mercy.