Today my father is recovering from a surgery, having swapped out his 92-year-old heart valve for a new model, threaded through a vessel in his groin up into his atrium, flawlessly performed, and now he is home and comfy, slurping a tangy bowl of egg-lemon soup. He is marinating in gratitude, finding himself in his tenth decade with mind and body and spouse all more or less intact, and he is grateful not to have suffered the same detour my mother went down when she had the same procedure several years back, and the catheter wormed through a wall of her heart muscle, precipitating a Code Blue and profuse apologies from the cardiologist. She rebounded gradually, and now they spend long hours on their porch, taking in the chitter of goldfinches and cardinals vying for time at the birdfeeder portal, and they are as deeply in love as I have ever known them to be. I am learning that my greatest legacy from them will be a kind of patient resilience, and for this I am grateful, too.

Today I also learned a new nugget about the poet Hart Crane, that enigmatic Modernist genius who flourished between the World Wars, and who threw himself from a steamship at age 32 to drown in the Gulf of Mexico. I have long admired the Baroque optimism of his epic poem The Bridge, envious of the lush lyric lines and mystical scaffoldings that have sung to me whenever I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, taking in all the energetic geometries of that cathedral-like space. The nugget is this: Crane’s father was a businessman and a confectioner, and he designed a candy that remains ubiquitous in sweet shops and checkout lines to this day: the Life Saver.

I have known for some time that Louise Glück’s father invented the X-Acto Knife, and this nugget seems an apt expression of legacy, as she executes her poems with surgical precision. Hart Crane however, on that last whiskey-drenched voyage, could’ve benefitted from something more buoyant than a metaphor. His body was never was recovered, and his father’s gravestone bears an addendum, “Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 lost at sea.”

My brother also succumbed far too young to alcohol, but his body was found on the floor of his bedroom. We buried his cremains in a tiny cemetery on the coast of Maine, with rough slate markers dating back to the 1700’s, just a stone’s throw from the high-tide line of a placid salt marsh inlet. My parents plan to join him there, sometime not too far off, after their bodies have journeyed through a medical school anatomy lab for dissection. Whatever tissues are left will be rendered into ash and strewn under a stand of ancient, swaying pines. If we keep spewing carbon at our current rates, irritating the polar ice caps, I can picture a time when all three of them will be lost at sea.