It felt right that I should be thinking about that now, ruminating on birth and death in a funerary chapel.

I shivered, gazed back at the pensive Lorenzo de’ Medici flanked by the allegorical figures of Dawn and Dusk, massive sculptures that only the great Michelangelo could have created, then did an about-face to take in Lorenzo Giuliano, equally massive but with a handsome idealized face and impossibly long neck, poised as if about to stand up, everything about him so alive, the two figures in stark contrast.

I thought of Vincent, who had contemplated his own death for days and weeks after Simone’s death, the man riddled with guilt that made it impossible for him to sleep, and the nonstop drinking he had used as a temporary salve over his excruciating pain, something too familiar to me.

I regarded the allegorical figures flanking Giuliano, Night and Day, the former imagined as a woman, everything about her exaggerated, overlong arms and legs, more highly polished and finished than her male counterpart, Day, an almost brutish figure with a lionlike head half-hidden by his massive shoulder. I moved in for a closer look at his roughly chiseled face, which looked unfinished, and remembered the entire tomb had never been completed, that Michelangelo had planned not only to be its architect and sculptor but to paint a fresco of the resurrection, but he never did.

I thought again of Vincent, contemplating suicide for weeks, until he realized he had a reason to live—his son! He’d written pages describing in detail how he had dressed and shaved and put on his best clothes and had gone to see Simone’s mother in her Paris apartment, and though she had slammed the door in his face, he’d refused to leave, pounding on her door until she had no choice but to let him in. He pleaded to see his son, and she had relented that much. Vincent had lovingly depicted the baby, with soft blond hair and blue-gray eyes like his mother, then described how he’d held him and kissed him and begged Marguerite to let him take the child home or at least let him visit. She had refused, accusing him of having nothing, no money, no way to care for a child, and Vincent knew she was right. He’d left her apartment a beaten man, once again considering the ways he might take his own life, all of it written in such painstaking prose, I could hear his words and see him prowling the streets of Paris, dejected and suicidal, the great-grandfather I had never known, more alive to me than my own parents.

A glance back at Giuliano, so regal and alive, then across the room at Lorenzo, dark and brooding, and those allegorical figures surrounding them, and it came to me that the entire room was an allegory of transition—Dawn to Dusk, Night to Day, the passage of time, the days of our lives leading toward our eventual deaths.

But Vincent had not chosen death. Not yet. With the one thing, the only thing that mattered to him—his son—he knew what he must do to get him back.