I helped an old man today.  I didn’t *do* anything, except hear him when he talked.  He said things like, “I was only trying to help my kids”; “Now they’re going to take my house”; and “I just don’t understand.”

Clearly, the eighty year old who sat across from me hadn’t had an easy go of it the past few years.  He had paid off his house ten years ago, and just recently taken a lump sum reverse mortgage to help his three kids save theirs.  He wore a gold Mickey Mouse watch with a black leather strap.  The house was modest, in a decaying neighborhood of town.  But it was theirs; he shared it with his disabled wife.  Car accident years ago.  Truck driver collided with her head-on from across the median.  He didn’t have to say how bad of a crash it was.  The sorrow he felt the day he learned about the accident still showed in his eyes.

More recently, the parasitic mortgage company had begun to foreclose.  Or so he thought.  Even his legal counsel punched him in the face.  ”It was their messes, Roy,” his jackass lawyer told him.  The man was only trying to help.  And yet, for $300 an hour, he had the pleasure of getting punched in the face.

He had come downtown that day to understand why his limited income senior exemption hadn’t been applied to all the taxing authorities.  It was disheartening to explain everything had been applied appropriately, and the value was well supported.  I couldn’t help, except to hear him talk.  He told of his wife’s decade-long disability, and his recent diagnosis (or preliminary diagnosis) of pancreatic cancer.  He could have been mute and I would have known he only wanted to outlive his wife.  But he said it anyway.  And the words stung, as I had expected they would.

His cardiologist, a man it was clear he trusted, urged him to forego rigorous testing, at least for the time being.  ”Give it a while, wait another couple of months and we’ll get another x-ray then,” the brilliance behind that statement is unfathomable.  If the spot of danger had grown, that would all but confirm the worst.  And yet, at 80, does the good cardiologist really believe he has that long?  Roy was already weak.

With heavy heart we parted ways.  Roy, forever a gentleman, shook my hand and thanked me genuinely for my time.  He had remembered to be kind and polite, virtues his mother taught him during the Great Depression, I’m sure.  Such a beautiful person; unlike the dregs I’m used to dealing with..  Many arrogant pricks.  This man, an honorable, unimpeachable man.

If I believed in prayer, I would ask God to do what it could to intervene, and ensure Roy’s sky stops falling.  Although I don’t, I still might.  Could it really hurt?