I thought his gift to the world was his skill, and it was, for a long time.

But his real gift, the one that outlasted him, the one that reshaped his wife and his daughter and, through the fund, thousands of strangers he never met, was not anything he did with a scalpel.

It was the way he died: honestly, in the open, held.

He turned his own dying into the last and best thing he ever taught, and the lesson was so simple that the surgeon in him had spent a lifetime overlooking it.

Let yourself be loved.