Toward the end of 1997, Bertie Boy receives the photo of me looking like a ferocious veteran hockey player and puts it in a frame next to his bed. He has photos of all his children and grandchildren in his apartment because we are the most important thing to him.

A few months later, in April of 1998, Bertie Boy falls and breaks his hip. He is now 85 years old, and although we are concerned, Bertie Boy is still in relatively good shape. He has to get hip surgery, and at first, everything is fine. Not long after, Bertie Boy starts to have complications and finds out he has Pseudomonas, a type of infection in his blood. My mother travels from Rhode Island to Connecticut to take care of him in the hospital. His condition is rapidly deteriorating, and he is in and out of a coma. My mom says my sister and I come up to Connecticut to see him in the hospital.

I had never really been to the hospital, only briefly for some stitches and a checkup, but this seems different. The hospital has that strange smell that all hospitals have, some type of rot mixed with cleaning solution. I walk into the hospital room to see him, and there are bottles of medication everywhere. He is hooked to several machines, and it doesn’t look like Bertie Boy. He is lying there unconscious, frail, weathered, and sick, not tall and strong like I am used to. His arms are out on top of the blanket, and his skin looks paper-thin, with bruises from where all the tubes and needles have been. I give him a hug, but I want to immediately get out of there. I don’t want to see him like this. The nurse is there, and she tells me that even though it doesn’t look like it, Bertie Boy knows we are there because she can see his heart rate and vital signs changing. She also says that before he was in the coma, he was loopy and confused about where he was. He thought he was still home in his apartment, and whenever any of the nurses walked in, he would point next to the bed. He would tell them to look at his grandson in his hockey outfit and say how proud he was of me. This nearly breaks me.

Even though Bertie Boy was weak, confused, sick, and on every medication, he wanted every nurse to see me. Even though Bertie Boy was fighting for his life, he wanted everyone to see me.

I go back to Rhode Island and talk to my mom every day, hoping that Bertie Boy somehow fights through this coma. I am not ready to lose him. I am not ready to lose the man who believes in me more than anything.

On May 28, 1998, I am sitting in the kitchen when my mom calls. My dad answers the phone and stands there quietly while my mom is talking. After a few minutes and nothing but one-word replies, he hangs up. He doesn’t need to say anything because I can see it in his face. Then he chokes out, “Bertie Boy died.” I don’t say anything. I walk up to my room and cry by myself. I don’t know how long I am in there. I keep thinking about his frail, lifeless body lying there. I keep thinking about the photo on his nightstand, and I decide that I will dedicate every time I step on the ice to him. He never got to see me play in person, but from that day forward, every time I played hockey, I believed he was there with me.