It all rearranged itself in that moment, the whole story of the past year, every lonely dinner and missed birthday and cold side of the bed, and I saw it at last for what it had truly been.

He had not been pulling away from us out of coldness.

He had not been drowning himself in his work out of some failure of love.

He had been grieving.

He had been grieving the death of the thing he had loved and trained for his entire life, the loss of his own gifted hands, the slow ending of the only version of himself he had ever known how to be, and he had been doing all of that grieving in complete and utter solitude, because he had decided, in his terror and his love, that he would rather bear it alone than let it touch us.

He had taken the strength he had left, the strength that was running out faster than any of us knew, and instead of spending it on his own sorrow, he had spent it here, bringing comfort to children who were as frightened as he was, while he hid his failing body from the only people in the world who would have wanted nothing more than to hold him through it.