BUSHKILL, Pa. — EVEN now, when I conjure him and he deigns to come, I always see him the same way. He’s encircled in sweet blue smoke, standing on the cool stone of the walkway around midnight. A little man, ancient, almost swallowed by the vivid articles of clothing that his devoted daughter always bought for him. They were nothing like the slate-colored clothes my grandfather would have chosen for himself. But they covered him and kept him warm.

In a way, they were just one more indignity, albeit one that came from kindness and filial devotion, in a life full of them, and yet it was testament to him that he always managed to bear those indignities and even to lend them grace. Cancer had taken his eye. The dentist had taken his teeth, and replaced them with ill-fitting dentures that hurt him and made speech difficult. Years in the mines had taken his hearing, making him all the more isolated.

I wasn’t there that night but the way I heard the story, he had gotten out of bed when he thought that everyone else in the house was asleep and slipped down into the basement, carrying all the possessions he still had left, his hats and a few tokens of the life he shared with his long-gone wife, and was stowing them away in boxes when my aunt caught him.

After some quizzing, he finally told her that he had dreamed that he was visited by my grandmother, then more than 10 years dead. He was packing to get ready to go see her. My aunt dismissed this and gently shooed him off. And so, to bear this latest small indignity, the old man stepped outside, packed the last of his pipes, a battered corncob with the good Virginia burley he preferred, lit it, and watched the sweet and earthy blue smoke curl up into that summer night.