Poignant sketch.  On this board it’d be a mighty stretch...but I hope you take this the right way:  Your post reads like the verse-prose soliloquies Bob Geldof has built an occasional song around, e.g.; The House @ The Top Of The World, ...Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things & No Small Wonder.  He and the Boomtown Rats never got a foothold in the States [I guess they pizzed-off the American DJs by sending a few of ‘em dead rats in shoeboxes as a misguided how-do-you-do] ...& most folks wouldn’t even know who he is if it weren’t for the Band Aid stuff...& even less for “Pink”, ...but I’ve always had a high regard for his songs.  Not as much the !pop! music of the Boomtown Rats, although there were some good songs there, ...but his solo work, lyrics, austere humor & no-schidt-no-shame-no-rules-somewhat-sardonic approach to songwriting.  I’m only pointing this out because for years I’ve felt those lyrics/stories had a tremendous, albeit dead-calm, quality about them that I’ve never heard anyone else marry to good melodies; a very brief epitome of a culture, I suppose, that I never tire of listening to.  Maybe it’s an Irish thing ~~ the troubadour; an everyday occurrence out in your neck of the meadows.  I don’t know.

He wrote a book titled Is That It?, ...wherein you can see the effort & the perseverance  behind a notion...that no one else but he believed in for a time.  & for that time it may have been the path of giving up all sense of personal well-being in order to secure the same for others, ...I don’t really know for sure.  Who does, for that matter?

FWIW, good story.