What have you learned from your life? What will you take with you when you die? Through this heartfelt, humorous, inspirational, and oftentimes brutally honest collection of essays, PATHS Humanitarian Writing Award winner H.L. Sudler embarks upon a journey of self-discovery in his quest to define what it truly means to be a patriarch in the wake of his father's death. Searching for answers among tales of love and war, triumph and losses, religious awakening and personal evolution, Sudler begs the reader to gaze deeply into themselves and beneath fears, flaws and anger, and across borders. For him, from man to gentleman and ultimately to patriarch.