I think, more than anything, about my grandfather, and about the strange and patient gift he left me, which was not really the company or the money at all.

What he left me was a way of seeing, and a way of holding myself, that had taken me my whole life to grow into and that I only fully understood after that Christmas.

Everyone else in my family had spent their lives performing — performing wealth, performing success, performing a closeness we did not have.

And my grandfather had spent his life doing the opposite: watching quietly, judging accurately, keeping his own counsel, and acting only, decisively, when it mattered.

He had seen, long before I could admit it, exactly what my father and sister were.

He had also seen, and this is the part that still undoes me, exactly what I was — not the failure and embarrassment my family had labeled me, but, in his words, the one with the clearest head in a messy family.