You have trusted me for sixty-nine years and I have never once let you fall.

I am not going to start now, just because I am gone.

I read that line three times, there in the office, and then a fourth, and each time my eyes blurred a little more.

You have trusted me for sixty-nine years and I have never once let you fall.

I am not going to start now, just because I am gone.

It was so completely him — the plainness of it, the quiet confidence, the refusal to be sentimental even here, at the very end, from the other side of death.