As they balance risks and benefits, the doctors keep postponing my chemotherapy. But without chemo, I only get worse. I appear calm but struggle with my emotions—particularly my guilt about the impact my death would have.

Remembering how my father found a way to live the values in his family without entering the ministry. When he first studied Freud, it reminded him of his mother preaching.

I learn that I have Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Despite all the uncertainties that remain, there is grim satisfaction to knowing one thing for sure.

Remembering how my parents met as teenagers—and from such different backgrounds. In my father’s family, the highest value was religious faith. In my mother’s, it was scientific research.

During my first days in the hospital, I become increasingly sick and weak. My daughters resist asking questions. My son asks just one question.

Remembering the mole on my father’s chest, the metastasis that followed, and his first seizures. In 1973, surgery was the only effective treatment for melanoma. If that didn’t work, little else did.

I do not perceive. I do not understand. And yet I do. In the week before my diagnosis, I am not the same person. I know and I don’t know that I am seriously ill.

Remembering what was most unique about my father—how closely he followed what was happening behind your eyes and between your ears. His warm and easy understanding was the secret of his charm.

There are signs of cancer before my diagnosis, but we miss them. When our primary care physician sends me to the emergency room, we miss some other signs, and Suzanne drops me off at the wrong building.

Remembering my parents together, particularly their partnership of projects on an old farm. Then one summer those projects stopped.

It is December 28, 2017. Forty-four years have passed since my father died. I am with my wife in a Boston emergency room. A doctor is telling us that I have leukemia.

Eleven years old, I go alone to the hospital to say farewell to my father, who is dying of cancer.