For Bill, it was it was his grandfather he went to spend the winter with. His grandmother had died that summer and Bill's mother was holding down a job she couldn't leave. His father -- well, he wasn't around that much.

So there was no-one else really for Grandpa. Bill had always loved the old man. As a little boy Grandpa had been his hero. He could fish, whistle, play a banjo and tell great Civil War stories about the countryside he and Grandma had built their homestead in. They lived like people in another century, Bill always thought.

"They had electricity and a TV, a phone," he said. "It was just, like some old country life they lived."

Bill had learned to ride Cecil, the lazy old farmhorse, long retired from plowing and being ridden by adults. Grandma sent him out to feed the rabbits and the chickens.

"It was just like history living with them," Bill laughed. He spent every summer with them until he was about sixteen and became restless and hormone-driven. Then he refused to go for two or three years.

When Grandma died, they all went back for the funeral, even Dad. Grandma was buried and they stayed for a couple of weeks. Enough for Bill to see that Grandpa wasn't doing so great.

"I didn't know what was happening, but he couldn't focus on stuff like before. He kept calling me Wilbur, which was weird, because I knew Wilbur had been his brother who died in the war."

Later, his mother told Bill Grandpa's neighbor had called. Grandpa had gone knocking on their door in the middle of the night. He said bears were trying to get in the house. There were no bears, just a lonely frightened old man who was confused.

The neighbors took him and tucked him up on the sofa for the night. And for seven more nights after that, then they called his daughter.

"We don't mind," they said. "Your Dad's always been a great neighbor to us. We're just afraid something bad's going to happen if he stays alone."

So it was Bill who went driving like a bat out of hell, loaded with goodies his mother packed in the car, a handful of phonecards and a gas card from his dad.

He stayed until Grandpa died, asleep in his own bed, his grandson huddled under a quilt on one side of the bed, his arms around the old man.

"I was scared," he said to me. "I knew he was probably dying and that was hard for me. But towards morning, he kind of stopped all his restless kicking about and I heard him say something."

Bill paused.

"His voice sounded so young, my Grandpa, and he said 'Oh Rose, it's you."

Rose had been Grandma's name. Grandpa died very quietly in Bill's arms an hour or so later.

"You know, when I went there, I was a kid. And I wasn't at all sure about what I was doing. But after It was over and I was watching Mom and all the other relatives standing there while Grandpa's coffin was lowered in beside Grandma's and I knew I'd become a completely different person."

Bill had become a man, the kind who knew what it was to hold an old dying man in his arms in the dark and understand that this was one of the finest things he would ever do.