he lived downtown with his largish catholic family and worked hard and was closer to his wifes family than ours and he never saw us much , and after mom died we did not see him at all because she had been closer to him than his flesh-and-blood father , but at the times he did visit blaise adored him because ben was a man who knew who he was , and had made it through to the other side of something like what blaise was going through , and he was a big happy man who held his responsibility and his life and family on his shoulders like an atlas and laughed .