I liked his sense of duty. There was something in his nature that was capacious, a spirit that could stretch; he absorbed bad news; he negotiated, compromised, made decisions, laid down rules, held relatives together. Much of it was the result of being born the first son in an Igbo family and having risen to its mesh of expectations and dispensations. He infused meaning into the simplest of descriptions: a good man, a good father. I liked to call him “a gentle man and a gentleman.”
