It covers lost wages for husbands and wives who have to step back from their work to care for a dying spouse, so that love does not have to compete with the rent.

It places grief counselors directly into the wards where families receive the hardest news, so that no one has to hear those words in an empty hallway with no one to turn to.

Everything Marcus had needed and not had in his six months of solitude, the fund now tries to give to others, and that, more than any bronze plaque, is how he goes on healing people who will never know his name.

I think about that often, the strange long reach of a single person’s suffering when it is turned toward good.