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upon the elderly that are starved for attention. I felt a connection to him. I empathized with him, even when I knew what he wanted wasn’t reasonable—ridiculous, even—and began to understand that some of the crazier stuff he did toward the end was just his way of trying to right a wrong—that he desperately needed to feel important. I could not help but align myself to him, and to see him in such a state was, and still is, terrible. After an afternoon of watching him, I went out into the hall to stretch my legs and clear my head. The portrait of an Anglo-American Jesus tried to reassure me that everything was going to turn out just fine. But I was not so certain, and when Dad and I went outside so he could smoke his pipe, we discussed the severity of the situation. At a certain point, I think, you have to violate a person’s autonomy for the sake of his overall well-being, and when my Uncle came home later, the three of us had a conversation on the matter. I think that my Dad and Uncles and I did not want to tell their father “No.” I think there was a hope that Grandpa could bounce back, that his stubbornness would keep him going and that he could and would live forever—a delusion that we can no longer afford to indulge in. The next morning my Uncle called EMS to take off with Grandpa. He was not all that happy about it and told the men he’d kick them in the berries if they touched him. The EMTs told my Uncle that they couldn’t help him if he didn’t agree to go. Now, I still don’t know how he did it, but somehow my Uncle managed to get Grandpa to agree, and soon thereafter we all met at the hospital. Grandpa called the rush in the ambulance “a ride straight to hell.” When I went back to see him in the ER, he winked at me. Flesh that had once been muscle hung loosely from his skeletal arm as he stretched. The skin that had been covered the day before, the soft wrinkled paper-like skin of his chest and upper arms, was a horrid yellow beneath the fluorescent light. The crescent of hair that had receded well behind the top of his head, save the few long hairs that clumped together toward the center, appeared disheveled and wild. He smelt of ointment, the awful brown disinfectant stuff that the nurses had rubbed onto him. He smelled like stale air. I held his hand and felt the tendons in them. I thanked him for agreeing to come. There could only be two of us at a time in the ER, so we—the “we” growing larger as more and more visitors and family members came—took shifts. He said he felt like he was sitting on a two-by-four and complained about the catheter. A woman came and