“If someone needed help tomorrow,” he said, “you’d forget to ask whether you could afford to give it.”

“That sounds like a compliment.”

“It scares me.”

“Why?”

“Because you never know when to let someone else be the problem.”

I was too tired to understand what he was trying to tell me.

I thought he wanted one corner of his life in which neither cancer nor I watched him constantly.

I let the conversation end.