I had to face up to the fact that I had to call him.

His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look - until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.

There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice.

..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.

The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.