Ramona wrote it down word for word, because she was careful and because she knew, as I was beginning to know, that his words would matter later.

But I want to record something she could not put in the file, which is how he was, doing it.

There was no relish in him.

I had braced for some — I would not have blamed a dying man, betrayed as he had been, for taking a little grim satisfaction in cutting the ungrateful out.

But that was not what I saw.

What I saw was a man doing a piece of hard, sad, necessary work, the way you’d see someone taking down a tree that had died and become a danger.