The doctor who told my father he had incurable cancer spent 10 seconds delivering that news before leaving the examining room.

My father spent the next five months absorbing that fact, fading from a vigorous man capable of booming laughter to a wraith in a chair who stared into the middle distance.

"It was the diagnosis that killed him," my mother told me years later, "not the cancer itself."

I doubt that was exactly true, but I know my father well enough to believe that…