And then there is the flip side. I no longer live in fear.

That is not completely true. I am a parent. I am always a little bit in fear. That is in part what it means to love. There is no love without loss, on one side or the other. We are mortal.

But I lived in fear of this day for nine years. For nine years, starting the morning when I was a third-year medical student and my mother called to tell me that my father had heart failure with an ejection fraction of twenty percent, I feared this day.

I also feared its antithesis, the long decline. I feared watching my father’s breathing become daily more of a struggle. I feared he would die in the hospital, drowning as the fluid his heart couldn’t handle backed up into his lungs, when he decided he would rather not be intubated.

(I also hoped that he might turn out to be a heart-lung transplant candidate, and a small, self-injurious part of me will always wonder if I should have pushed him to pursue that option in more depth.)

So yes, I am finally free of that fear, and another part of me knows or believes that my father too is finally free of fear. I think he and I were alike a bit in our understanding of mortality, our wish to accept it, and our inability to fully let go of this life.

When the curtain of my grief parts, I see that the other side was always there. The sun still shines (though not, truthfully, in upstate New York). Jon Stewart is still funny, and curling, however challenging, is still not an athletic event. My son is still adorable and the joy of joys in my life.

More profoundly, the stars still call to me, a song of mystery, of questions about the universe, about existence, that live beyond human comprehension. John Green wrote, “I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.” I think that is what I must be doing, as I try to comprehend infinity from a finite life.

And then I remember that my mother and my father both survived this loss. Though I often felt a deep sadness that I never met either of my grandfathers, I never wondered if their deaths had left my parents incapable of fully enjoying the lives they continued to live. Though I empathized with my grandmothers for the thirty-plus years they outlived their lovers and life partners, I never doubted that my grandmothers found real happiness in seeing us, their grandchildren, grow up.

I know now that my dad missed his father every day for past 39 years and one month. I know he wished he’d had more time with his dad. But I also believe that my dad had a rich, wonderful, impossibly full life in those four decades, time in which he fell in love with my mother, raised me and my sister, had an outstanding career, and inspired the former students who told me at his memorial service, “He changed my life.”

It must be possible then.

And I hope I will too.