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and your brother,” she said to Eben IV when she’d hung up. “They need you. Your dad and I will be right here when you get back tomorrow.”
    Eben IV looked over at my body: at the clear plastic breathing tube running through my right nostril down to my trachea; at my thin, already chapping lips; at my closed eyes and sagging facial muscles.
    Phyllis read his thoughts.
    “Go home, Eben. Try not to worry. Your dad’s still with us. And I’m not going to let him go.”
    She walked to my bedside, picked up my hand, and started to massage it. With only the machines and the night nurse who came in to check my stats every hour for company, Phyllis satthrough the rest of the night, holding my hand, keeping a connection going that she knew full well was vital if I was going to get through this.
    It’s a cliché to talk about what a big emphasis people in the South put on family, but like a lot of clichés, it’s also true. When I went to Harvard in 1988, one of the first things I noticed about northerners was the way they were a little shyer about expressing a fact that many in the South take for granted: Your family is who you are .
    Throughout my own life, my relationship with my family—with my parents and sisters, and later with Holley, Eben IV, and Bond—had always been a vital source of strength and stability, but even more so in recent years. Family was where I turned for unquestioning support in a world that—North or South—can all too often be short of this commodity.
    I went to our Episcopal church with Holley and the kids on occasion. But the fact was that for years I’d only been a step above a “C & E’er” (one who only darkens the door of a church at Christmas and Easter). I encouraged our boys to say their prayers at night, but I was no spiritual leader in our home. I’d never escaped my feelings of doubt at how any of it could really be . As much as I’d grown up wanting to believe in God and Heaven and an afterlife, my decades in the rigorous scientific world of academic neurosurgery had profoundly called into question how such things could exist. Modern neuroscience dictates that the brain gives rise to consciousness—to the mind, to the soul, to the spirit, to whatever you choose to call that invisible, intangible part of us that truly makes us who we are—and I had little doubt that it was correct.
    Like most health-care workers who deal directly with dying patients and their families, I had heard about—and even seen—somepretty inexplicable events over the years. I filed those occurrences under “unknown” and let them be, figuring a commonsense answer of one kind or another lay at the heart of them all.
    Not that I was opposed to supernatural beliefs. As a doctor who saw incredible physical and emotional suffering on a regular basis, the last thing I would have wanted to do was to deny anyone the comfort and hope that faith provided. In fact, I would have loved to have enjoyed some of it myself.
    The older I got, however, the less likely that seemed. Like an ocean wearing away a beach, over the years my scientific worldview gently but steadily undermined my ability to believe in something larger. Science seemed to be providing a steady onslaught of evidence that pushed our significance in the universe ever closer to zero. Belief would have been nice. But science is not concerned with what would be nice. It’s concerned with what is .
    I’m a kinetic learner, which is just to say that I learn by doing. If I can’t feel something or touch it myself, it’s hard for me to take interest in it. That desire to reach out and touch whatever I’m trying to understand was, along with the desire to be like my father, what drew me to neurosurgery. As abstract and mysterious as the human brain is, it’s also incredibly concrete. As a medical student at Duke, I relished looking into a microscope and actually seeing the delicately elongated neuronal cells that spark the synaptic connections