One of my grandfather’s best summers was the year he died. Richard Mommsen, my dad’s eighty-one-year-old father, learned in May 2002 that he had aggressive terminal cancer. Palliative care was the only realistic option. Shortly after getting the diagnosis, he and Grandma moved into an apartment in my parents’ house. Most of us eight siblings were still living at home, and one of my brothers, a nurse, became his companion. Thanks to the steroids he was taking to control symptoms, he felt more energetic than he had for years. Alongside Grampa, all of us embarked on three months of intensive living.

His health obviously wasn’t that of a well-functioning body; it was the kind of health Wendell Berry describes as wholeness.