And then he grew up, and came to understand, year by year, exactly what he had promised and exactly what it would cost, and he kept it anyway.

That is the rare and holy thing: a promise made in a child’s innocence, honored with an adult’s full knowledge of the price.

Julian could have released himself at any point, could have told himself, with perfect reasonableness, that a five-year-old’s hospice vow was not binding on the young man he had become.

Instead he treated the promise of his five-year-old self as sacred, as more binding than any contract, and carried it into a world his younger self could never have imagined, and paid its full price with his eyes open.

When he told me, at that kitchen table, that he could not forget the promise, he was not being stubborn.