He knelt down.

He said he was sorry, and he did not follow the sorry with a but. And then he did the hardest, most expensive thing a proud man can do — he sold what he loved to pay back what his family had stolen from sick children, and asked nothing for it, and expected no credit.

That doesn’t undo forty years of silence at the head of the table.

It doesn’t earn him back into my children’s lives on his terms.

But it is something, and I have decided that a grandfather who is genuinely trying to become a better man in the last chapter of his life can send two cards a year, if the cards are honest.

My children will decide for themselves, when they’re older, what he is to them.