Aaron Smith posted this story about the kindness of an NYC cab driver. It's a good read, and it reminds me of something vaguely similar that happened to be a few decades ago.
I had just moved 400 miles from home to a small town in Minnesota near where my grandfathers sister had moved in the 1930's. He didn't get to see her very often, so when I moved near her farm he had an excuse to make the trip.
The house I bought needed a ton of work, my youngest brother needed an excuse to skip high school, my grandfather needed a ride to Minnesota, so I ended up with a couple hard working helpers once weekend or so per month. Good deal for me.
One weekend my grandfather insisted on coming out to Minnesota. He had just been out a few weeks earlier, I didn't need any help and my brother wasn't enthused about another road trip.
He insisted.
They made the trip.
While he was helping me strip wallpaper that weekend, I noticed that he was hitting the nitro pills pretty regularly. He'd had a heart attack about ten years earlier but all things considered appeared to be in fairly good condition. I asked him about the nitro but didn't get much of a response.
As he normally did, on that weekend he visited the sister that lived nearby. On the way home though, he asked my brother to detour a couple hours out of the way to visit his other sister. That was new.
The day after he got home from the road trip he went outside and did the one thing that he'd not done since his heart attack. He split wood - not with a powered splitter, but with an ax, the old fashioned way, just as he'd done from the time he was a kid up until his heart attack a decade ago
He died splitting that wood.
I'm pretty sure that he had a plan.
