“Daylight is one of life’s greatest gifts,” his mother had told him years ago. “It is easier to accept and believe in daylight.” He wonders now if this is why he has always felt a slight sinking when the sun disappears; even on the happiest of days, there is a sadness and an awareness of the shadows. Sundowning, they call it in hospitals and geriatric units, when confusion and distortion settles in. But he feels he has known some fragment of this for much of his life.

He was only ten when the train wreck took his father, but the moment divided his life as clearly and sharply as scalpel to flesh; that part of his mother that had radiated the light of day long after it passed was suddenly gone, extinguished, cut away with such exact precision that he spent the next fifty years looking for it, as if it might have been saved and frozen, like the many specimens his father had surgically removed and sent to pathology for study. It was only in the aftermath of her death that it hit him; all those hopes of a return had been futile.

As a boy, Frank was fascinated by his father’s knowledge and skill, the way he could talk about the human body as if it were a machine, the way he could thread a needle and mend something better than Frank’s mother or grandmother, and the way that nothing seemed to scare or bother him, no amount of blood or trauma. People often stopped them in public to say thank you, lifting sleeves and pant legs, tugging shirt collars off to the side to show the excellent remnants of his work, from the faintest white lines to those resembling a zipper or track. His father didn’t look like a hero; in fact, he was the opposite—average height and build, dark hair, and an expression that always seemed studious, as if he were on the verge of figuring it all out. But he had an air of confidence about him that made others trust him, and apparently he had more than lived up to it all in the operating room.