My father was 80 years old when he died of congestive heart failure, after a long, full life, thereby avoiding the far worse fate brewing in the carcinoma that had invaded his eye socket and cranial cavity. His heart was his best friend, and my father taught me that a gentle death can be full of grace and beauty. The body in its winding down becomes something greater than itself; mind, feeling, and spirit are distilled, becoming just this body laboring to let go—just this.

And to be there helping the body in its becoming is to be present when a window opens briefly on the mystery and power of life itself, streaming through us from our first breath to our last.

Two years before my father died, my daughter Gretchen was born in the front seat of our Toyota Camry stationwagon, on the shoulder of Route 1 at the Brunswick Traffic Circle, eight minutes shy of our destination, the Mercer Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. It was rush-hour on a mild Monday morning in September, cars streaming by as I lifted Gretchen off the bucket seat and handed her to Amy, who began to nurse her, saying over and over to calm me as I drove the rest of the way, “It’s okay. We have a beautiful baby girl.” Amy’s water had broken a mile and a few minutes before. “Pull over,” she said in the grip of a contraction. And then, “No, keep going.” She repeated this litany as her contractions surged and subsided and we wove through traffic past burger joints and muffler shops until, in a voice so calm and powerful that some part of me is still there listening even now, Amy says, “David, stop the car. We are going to have this baby now.”

As she tells it, Amy realized that trying to hold back what was happening would do more harm to her and the baby than going with it, so she gave herself to the power flowing through her. And that was the voice I heard. We learn by going where we have to go. Gretchen is now 18 years old and a student at the San Francisco Ballet School. Recently, she and I were discussing her decision to leave San Francisco and seek a place in another company. When I asked her why, she said, “Dad, I need to dance.” Her voice was so calmly passionate, self-assured, and determined that I thought, wow, my little girl is all grown up. And then I realized that I had heard that voice before, eighteen years earlier, when her mother told me to stop the car.