I Found My 87 Year Old Father Eating Cold Food Alone and Realized How Afraid He Had Become

would tell me things. Not profound things. Not deathbed revelations. Just things. Stories about his father’s hardware store in Trenton. About the summer he worked on a tobacco farm and hated every minute of it. About the first time he saw my mother, at a church social, wearing a yellow dress, and how he told his friend afterward that he was going to continue reading …