My grandfather has been fighting cancer for a long while now. He’s already gone through 3 separate rounds of chemotherapy and the last one almost killed him, so as time goes on he gets weaker and weaker and I have to help him more and more. My grandma herself is not well enough to take care of him alone. At first it was just heavy manual labor stuff, but now I do all the outside work, I come over and move things inside, I run some errands, etc. On occasion he falls down or some emergency situation and I have to bolt out of my house at 2 am and sprint 300 yards to their house to help him. And he always insists on paying me for practically doing nothing. And I refuse to take the money and it always turns into a big fight because I don’t want him to pay me cause I’m just trying to be a good grandson and he’s that kind of proud old-school Italian that takes it as an insult when I won’t accept his money. And with the constant resurgence of the cancer he has been slowly giving up on fighting it and will most likely soon succumb to the disease. But last week for the first time in a while I really thought he was finding the will to fight the cancer again because when I was leave after doing some odds and ends, he said:

” Willy I really want to get my strength back…….so I can punch you right in the face for refusing this money.” 

I love this man.