To sit with the children.

He reads to them.

He sits with the families in the waiting rooms, the ones getting the kind of news he got.

He does whatever there is to be done, whatever a man can do to ease things for a frightened child or an exhausted parent, without ever needing a scalpel in his hand.”

I stood very still and let that settle over me.

For six months, while I had believed he was pulling double shifts out of some hardening workaholism, some coldness that was pushing him further and further from us, my husband had been getting up every morning and coming to a garden full of dying children to give away, quietly and anonymously, the last good years of his strength.