It was a small thing at first, run out of our living room, a few families here and there.

But it was real, and it was his, and it gave the last two years of his life a purpose every bit as large as any surgery he had ever performed, and in some ways larger.

The surgeon who had spent a career saving lives with his hands spent the end of it saving something else, the spirits of frightened families, with nothing but his wisdom and his empathy and his enormous, hard-won understanding of exactly what they were going through.

He had believed, that day in the garden, that without his hands he had lost his purpose.