“I’m a storyteller,” he’d read at ten in the morning on Tuesday, June 30, 1987. “It’s all I basically know how to do. For the first time in my life, I hate to do it, though. Nonetheless I’m going to tell you a story.

“Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth with an irony that a self-respecting fiction writer would be ashamed to invent.

“So it was that last November I began a new novel with a scene in which the main character seeks peace in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Bangkok where he meditates upon the four truths of Buddha.

“Life is suffering.

“That is the first of the Buddha’s truths. It was also my first sentence.

“Life is suffering.

“As I finished typing those words at three-forty-five on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in autumn, I turned to glance out my study window and frowned at the sight of my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, staggering across our front lawn. He was doubled over, his left hand pressed against his right chest. I rushed to meet him as he stumbled into the house.

“ ‘I can’t breathe,’ he said. ‘The pain. There’s something wrong with my chest.’

“No doubt I broke several traffic laws, speeding to our family doctor. Really, I don’t remember. A lengthy exam made it seem that Matt had pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lung. Antibiotics were prescribed. The pain went away.

“But as the Buddha says, life is suffering. During Christmas vacation, the pain came back, not in his chest this time but in his back. An X ray revealed that Matt had a tumor the size of two fists.

“And so the horror began.

“Matt had bone cancer, specifically a type known as Ewing ’s sarcoma. We hadn’t detected it sooner because Ewing ’s is sneaky. The pain comes and goes. Often it isn’t at the site of the tumor but rather at various other sites responding to presssure from the tumor. For a brief time, the explanation for the pain seemed to be that Matt had hunched over too long in marathon guitar-practice sessions.