I think it was that he understood something about them that he had come, at the end, to understand about himself.

A soldier who is wounded in service gives everything he has for people who, in the moment of his need, are very often not there — who have moved on, who are comfortable, who do not think of him.

He knows, in his body, the specific loneliness of having been useful and then set down.

Raymond had spent his last months learning that same loneliness in a cold bedroom, discovering that a lifetime of providing for a family bought him, in the hour he needed them, precisely nothing.

He was not a sentimental man, and he did not frame it grandly.

But I believe that when he directed his fortune toward the people who cared for abandoned and dying servicemen, he was reaching across his own experience toward theirs, saying, in the only language a dying banker had left — the language of where the money goes — that he saw them, and that they would not be as alone as he had been.