Anthony Walker always liked to think of himself as “the man.” He always liked to think of himself as “tough Tony.”

That’s how he felt jumping out of planes while in the Army and stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He felt it later, too, as a small-business owner, husband and a father to six children.

“A provider,” said Walker, 49, trying to define what being “the man” meant to him.

“I might sound like a caveman,” he said in self-deprecation and, amid all the things he’d lost, at least he still had a sense of humor. “And, if I do, please forgive me.”

But caveman or not, he always aspired for his family “to depend on me. For me to be (a) macho man.”

“Tough Tony, is what I called myself at one point in time,” he said.

But that was before Walker, a Plainfield resident, began suffe

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