His grandfather had said, “Our job is to find the pieces and put them together, each generation getting closer to the whole.” And now Frank’s own earlobes bear those heavy creases, but who needs the extra proof when all else is so clear. “Just say it,” Frank said at his last appointment. “I’m a walking time bomb.” But the young man, barely out of school, refused to do so, just continued in that calm, steady voice talking about heart-healthy diets and surgical options, how these options don’t come with guarantees, and how there are all kinds of risks anesthetizing a brain as old as his, if they would be even willing to try it, as if Frank had never heard any of it before.

Our job is to find the pieces and put them together, and, yes, Frank has always found solace in that, as well as in studying something contained by time or geography or both, contained in a way that you could imagine someday knowing all that can possibly be known. Here are the remains of a man who was born here and died there at approximately age nineteen in 1322 BC. It would drive him crazy to be in a field constantly growing and changing, to be in a lab racing for the cure, or programming computers, where the language you learned last year is dead and everything is different, like when Lil was not able to help the kids with their sixth-grade math. How frustrating to try and put together a puzzle that is constantly changing shape and size and color. No, it has been much more satisfying for him to focus, to explore the objects discovered in a particular site at a particular time. Find the pieces and put them together. His grandfather ended many of his case discussions this way: the symptoms, the diagnosis, the treatment. For Frank, it was the discovery, the dating and cataloging, the preservation.

“My job is to stitch up or get rid of whatever your grandfather finds that shouldn’t be there,” Frank’s father once joked. “I’m the cleanup man.” His father resembled his grandfather—the posture, the timbre of their voices—and Frank now has trouble distinguishing the physical features of one from the other, an overlapping blurred symbol of strength and knowledge. But images of his mother remain vivid—too vivid—the before and the after; the happy wife of an exemplary surgeon living in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the wife of a slow-moving tobacco farmer in rural eastern North Carolina.