Summary

Chapter 11 is titled “Always Look Out for the Little Guy.” The author describes the last day of her father’s life, the things he was proud of, and the things he never got to do. “He never wanted to be old,” she says, “but he should have been older” (120). She is both surprised and not surprised by how many people come to offer their condolences, how many stories of his care for others she hears, and how she keeps remembering how he always told her to “‘look out for the little guy’” (122). On the cold and rainy day of the funeral, she says, she smiled the whole time, saying that “maybe in this sadness if I look like a buoy, I can stop somebody else from drowning” (123). There are more stories of how good and generous he was, the burial service progresses, and...