They Sold His Medals and Watered Down His Medicine to Pay for a Cruise. They Never Knew About the Trust

At first I heard it as a sad thing, an old man’s bitter arithmetic — a tally of who had failed him.

But that is not what it was.

Walt was not keeping score.

He had run the cruelest experiment a lonely rich man can run, the one where you hide the money and watch who stays, and he had run it not to catch anyone out but because he genuinely could not tell, anymore, whether he was loved for himself or for what he could give — and that not-knowing had become unbearable to him.

Money does that to a person.