We looked forward, out into the gathering starlight, and we walked out toward it together, hand in hand, carried still, and always, by the light of a man who had loved us enough, in the end, to let us love him back.

People ask me, sometimes, whether it makes me sad that Lily wants to spend her life around illness and dying, given what illness and dying took from her.

And I understand the question, but I think it misunderstands what she actually watched happen.

She did not watch her father be destroyed by his illness.

She watched him be transformed by how he met it.

She watched a strong man learn to be a cared-for one, and a private man learn to be an honest one, and a dying man teach a whole hospital how to live.