He almost did.

And then the recording ended, abruptly, the screen going dark and throwing our two stunned faces back at us, mine and my daughter’s, in the black glass.

I realized I was weeping, and that I had been for a while, and that they were not only the old tears of grief.

There was something else in them now.

I had just watched my husband spend his second-to-last evening on earth trying to pull his lonely brother back toward the living.

That was who he was, right to the end.