“Premature babies never remember the machines, or the weeks they spent in this unit,” she said gently.

“But the parents always remember exactly who stood beside them during the storm.”

I have thought about that sentence a great deal since, because it named the whole of what I had nearly failed to be.

I had spent my life certain that what mattered was what you built — the structures, the firm, the visible monuments to a man’s competence and drive.

And a doctor in a Nashville hospital told me, handing me my son, that the baby would remember none of it, and that the only thing that would endure, the only thing anyone truly remembers, is who was present.