He had not lost it.

He had only just begun to find the truest version of it.

I have thought often about the difference between the two kinds of help my husband gave in his life, the help of the operating room and the help of the garden.

In the operating room, he had saved lives, dozens and dozens of them, and there is nothing in the world more valuable than that, and I will never diminish it.

But it was, by its nature, a solitary and hidden kind of help, performed on strangers behind closed doors, the patient asleep, the family in a waiting room down the hall, the whole thing over before most of them ever saw his face.