My descent toward death began in a San Francisco hospital where toilets overflowed and a centenarian man lay dying in the next bed surrounded by his children. “Where is the money?” his sons and daughters said.

“Aarrggh,” the old man replied.

It was autumn in San Francisco, a holiday. While doctors golfed and dined out in San Francisco, winter came to the old man in the bed beside me.

I found a doctor there in California, a stranger who treated me by phone, for there was no attending physician in the hospital.

“Once before,” I said. “Non-­Hodgkin’s. Four.”

“When?”…