“Is surgery a possibility?” I ask. She shakes her head.

“He won’t be resuscitated,” she whispers. “The bleeding is too extensive. His brain stem is affected. His liver and kidneys have something, too.”

I show her get-well cards that my sons Max and Isaac have made for her father. I tell her about the time years ago when Louie gave Max a drawing lesson after another child in the first grade laughed at him and called his drawing scribble-scrabble. Yet another great thing about Louie.

“Your dad showed Max how to draw a bunch of squiggly lines until they looked just like a coyote baying at the moon,” I say. “Then he showed him how to shade it so that the coyote cast a shadow on the ground. Now, Max draws his own comic strip characters. He drew some on the get-well card.”

“My dad’s great at drawing,” she says, smiling. “He’s great at everything. If you give him two matchsticks, he can build whatever he wants.”

It feels intrusive getting this glimpse into Louie’s personal life, when I’m so used to it being the other way around. Louie always knew who came and went. He even knew when I returned from chemotherapy every other Tuesday three years ago, offering his usual smile and a kind word. A natural pessimist, I was still persuaded when he would say, “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” I want so much to be able to say the same thing to him now.

I’m beginning to realize how little I know about him. I think he’s in his late 50s, that he hails from Puerto Rico and now lives in the Bronx, that he has a girlfriend whom he met when she worked in our building as a nanny. I know that he loves his daughters and grandchildren, and they love him. All the children love him, especially the two little girls who live on the first floor and like to call him the Grouch while he teases them and makes them giggle.

I watch as the rest of his family comes into the room — three generations, including a tiny infant. It’s time to give them their space. I walk red-eyed to the subway station.