Shortly before he died, my grandfather's business joined the handful of others downtown shuttered in the wake of the latest financial crisis. But, the Bamboo Washwright didn't close its doors because of the crisis. My mother and my uncle ended the Bamboo, two of the three children still close enough to watch over my grandfather's legacy and know when to close the doors. Parkinson's overcame his body, unimpeded by the medicine he refused to take, and when he could no longer write down the customer's dry cleaning details on the pad of lined yellow paper—it was time. He refused to use a walker or support of any kind, and broke his hip and shoulder by falling out of bed a week later. My grandfather's lifelong experiment with independence and self-determination had come to an end. With it ended an era of a family. As his generation enters its final chapter, we are left with questions about its family men: who were they, and what does their legacy mean for us? I ask myself these questions about my grandfather.

He distrusted people as a matter of everyday life. The untrustworthiness of “the Japs” always implicitly factored into his stories about the Pacific theatre, from the hot confusion of Pearl Harbor to the thick anticipation of the Okinawa occupation. Present also was an ambivalence about the Japanese people, an unwillingness to judge them one way or another as their base guile conflicted with the sort of mutual respect born from the clash of two equals. His views toward blacks and Latinos were less ambiguous.

The skeleton I visited when I went to the hospital was an extreme version of my grandfather. Distrust had metamorphosized into bare paranoia. He was convinced that the nurses and doctors were trying to harm him, and he engineered a different plan of escape every time I saw him. It was the worst when he'd try to recruit one of our family as his accomplices because his mind was still lucid but he couldn't talk clearly enough to get his point across. Being unable to express himself was only the most radical manifestation of a world that had been turned utterly upside down in the span of a bad fall, in which my grandfather had gone from proud business owner to what is known in hospital jargon as a “puller.” His hands were permanently weighted so that he would stop pulling out tubes vital to his continued existence but inimical to his sense of dignity and independence. He would frequently stretch his arms and scratch his head to show the nurses that their petty weights could not keep him down.

I cannot begrudge him his fear. Until his admittance to the hospital, he could not have been made to recognize the frailty of his age. Doubtless, his retirement at age 86 was the first break in the wall. The Bamboo, though a “family business,” had been the cornerstone of the convenient distance my grandfather kept from his family. Consumed with single-handedly managing and operating a small business, he had no time to fulfill fatherly roles beyond simply providing for his six children.

While he was in the hospital, cards and letters flooded in from customers charmed by his tenacity, expressing a deep compassion approaching familial love—as if he was their grandfather, too. My mother's reaction stays with me: that this is his family. I understood then why he had not wanted to give up his business despite all common sense; he would be giving up his family of customers, too.

Long after his children had gone their own ways—almost all of them leaving home as soon as possible—he clung to that business while it bled him dry, at $3,000 a month. He stayed in business by dipping into savings and dodging taxes. He fought to keep up the image of a man who could run his own business even at 86, but that came tumbling down when he entered the hospital and his children found out he owed the government and a business partner thousands of dollars. Then they—not my grandfather—were left to clean up the mess.

The exposure of that duplicity was not an exposure of his base greed or cowardice. Instead it was the exposure of his humanity, and solidified for me the image of him of a man striving to carve out a small niche within which he could exist on his own terms. He was an exemplar of his generation, which served our country in its time of need only to find that beyond the pale of fascism was a world even less sane. His generation's path to disillusionment was less traumatic than their childrens', who returned from Vietnam to find they were not the heroes their fathers were. In our society, where success and importance are measured in production, the elderly men that did as they were told and started families and businesses when they returned home from the Last Good War find now that we all are just waiting for them to die. The merry-go-round of capitalism mustn't slow spinning its crazy carnival cadence. My grandfather decided he wouldn't stand for it, would no longer do what was expected of him. He fought the system, and he was neither right or wrong for it—merely human.