And when he asked for the ocean, he was not saying goodbye to the sea.

He was closing a circle twenty-two years wide, bringing his unborn daughter, grown now, back to the last place he had been happy, before the storm took everything.

I moved through those weeks thinking I was improvising small kindnesses for a dying man.

He moved through them completing the final movements of a symphony he had been composing, alone, for two decades.

I have never known anyone who lived with that kind of patience, or that kind of love.” “He was,” Mr.