Chances are, he’d offer you some of his homemade prosciutto or salami. Angelo loved meat.

Which is why, as he came to the end of his life and doctors said he had just a week or so left, he asked for one last steak dinner.

But before his family could make that wish come true, doctors told him he could no longer eat solids. Puréed food only.

It’s a helpless feeling, knowing your loved one has no hope for recovery. You want to do something, anything, to make him comfortable. Angela called The Keg at highways 404 and 7.

“Can you put one of your steaks in a blender?” she asked dining room manager Chris Papadimitriou.

Chris was a little taken aback by the unusual request, but when he found out it was for a dying man, he vowed to make it happen.

After some online research, he came up with an idea to grind steak with a little French soup base. He gave it a try in his restaurant food processor and it came out nice and smooth.

Excited, he called Angela back, but she was putting her children to bed at the time and her husband, Michael, was with his father at Hill House Hospice on the other side of town, north of Major Mackenzie in Richmond Hill.

No worries, Chris said. “I’ll deliver it.”

“I don’t want you to go out of your way,” she said.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “I'll bring it over on my way home from work.”

It wasn’t really on his way home. Chris lives in Pickering. But he didn’t tell her that.

“Hold on and I’ll get my VISA card,” Angela said.

No need, he told her. We’re happy to do this.

“I was floored to see such good human beings,” Angela recalled.

Angela’s 8-year-old daughter was beside her mom in bed, listening.

“Mommy,” she said, “I’m going to marry someone like that.”

“I told her, 'Absolutely, you do need to marry someone like that.'”

Chris doesn’t want any praise, though.

“At the end of the day, people do so many more important, bigger things. It’s kind of embarrassing, but humbling, too, and I’m just glad I could do it.”

He had never been to a hospice before and he was impressed with Hill House. It felt like a cosy home.

Angelo had been sleeping a lot as his body geared down, but on the night that Chris arrived with the steak, the elderly man was awake and alert.

They chatted a bit with Michael translating, laughed about how they shared similar heritage (Angelo from Italy, Chris from Greece).

“God bless you and God bless your family,” Angelo said to Chris. “This is what life comes down to.”

Chris looked around the room filled with family, at the walls of photos of Angelo’s loved ones, and he knew it was true.

It was an introspective ride home, filled with thoughts about his own life, his own family.

“You always think you have the time, but you don’t," he mused. "At the end, it is the end. Makes no difference who you are, your time is here.”

He slipped into his children’s bedroom and kissed their sleeping foreheads.

Angelo, meanwhile, hung on for a few days more — long enough to share his seasoned advice with his family, “get along with each other, love each other, respect each other" - longer than any of the doctors expected.

And each morning, he asked, what is the date today?

On Friday, April 28, he left them all.

It was his wife Rosa’s birthday.