A loss, expected and dreaded, loomed. My uncle had had a massive heart attack four days earlier. He had been put on the ventilator. In a family of doctors, everyone knew that there was little chance of one coming back from that point. And yet, we had all hoped. A memory from 2016 comes back: my uncle had visited me, a month after we had lost his father, my great-uncle but much more than that—although I had grown up in a different city, I had been my great-uncle’s ward, the daugh