And so, in those two years, with David’s help and the support of the hospital board, he built something.

He established the Marcus Vance Patient Support Fund, and he poured into it the same care he had once poured into the operating room.

It grew out of everything he had learned in that garden and in those consultation rooms, and out of everything he had felt himself in the six lonely months before I found him: that when a family is handed a terminal diagnosis, the medical care is only half of what they need, and often not the hardest half.

The fund was built to provide the other half, the emotional counseling and the practical financial help that families in that situation so desperately need and so rarely receive, the support that keeps a household from coming apart under a weight it was never meant to carry.