It was nearly a year earlier that I had suggested we sail across the Atlantic. My father had been depressed, unsure what to do with himself. He tried to keep busy volunteering at local arts organizations and taking photographs. But neither of these pursuits ever fully absorbed him. The fully absorbing pursuit had always proved elusive.

Sailing was the exception. Sailing combined the aesthetics of light, space and water with the physics of sail, line and wind, and in the easy meshing of these themes my father’s restless character found vindication. Sailing, I knew, would make him feel like himself again.

But this was not my only motive in proposing such an audacious venture. My father was 80 years old, and while he was still fully mobile and aware, I knew time was growing short. And I worried that when his time ran out, he would not be ready.

I’m ashamed to say that this worry was not just for his sake, but my own. I had been there when my maternal grandparents began to decline. Neither of them had been ready to leave this life, and the job had fallen to my mother to ease their passage.

It was a job I did not want to perform for my father. I was not strong enough. I could, however, talk with him now, acknowledge his fears, regrets and uncertainty, and then suggest ways to make those feelings easier to bear.

One recent winter, we had gone for a walk in a cemetery near my parents’ home in western Massachusetts. He wanted to show me the plots he had bought for himself and my mother. It was the sort of thing one didn’t quite know how to react to. (Admiringly?)

The plots were good ones, as it happens, on a shady hillside far from the road. We stood there awkwardly. Death is never an easy subject. Best to be direct, I figured.

“So, how are you feeling about, you know, total extinction?” I said.

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t really need to. I knew he was scared, because I was scared, and I was like him.

You would think that everyone would be scared of dying, but this is not so. There are some maniacs in this world, my in-laws for instance, who evince no fear whatsoever of leaving it.

“You live your life and that’s it!” my father-in-law says with a cheerful shrug.

His attitude is perfectly rational, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less crazy. Death, to me, has always meant a moment of total helplessness. And as a committed control freak I found sanguinity impossible.

We are of course always in some way helpless — helpless to slow the flow of time, helpless to avert aging and loss. On the other hand, we’re also free to test the limits of our helplessness. Which prompted me to ask my father something else: “Is there anything you want to do now that would maybe make it easier to check out, when the time comes?”

This was a more manageable question. In good faith, he kicked it around for a bit, and then, more for my sake than his own, I think, he said, “Well, I always wanted to sail the Atlantic…”

“Well, why not?” I gushed, with relief. “I’d even go with you.”

There were real reasons not to go. First of all, when you’re 80, you don’t want to be more than 30 miles from a hospital, let alone 2,000 miles by water. My father took 16 pills a day, most of them for polycythemia vera, a rare form of blood cancer. His digestion was not what it had been, and he had trouble sleeping. At 6-foot-2, he might not even fit in a sailor’s bunk.

My father’s decision methodology involved exhaustive research, and in the weeks that followed, I received regular updates from him detailing various options, and the costs and logistics involved. I doubted whether this methodology would ever yield a convincing decision. Because it wasn’t just a question of costs and logistics. It was a question of how big to think, as you get older. How ambitious to be.

When you’re young, this question is easy. Aim high. Conquer everything. But with age the value of ambition becomes increasingly suspect, until eventually it can seem like just another of youth’s follies, a regrettable side effect of failing to recognize life’s true proportions.

If, on the other hand, you do recognize those proportions, and manage to inhabit them fully, you’re far more likely to be satisfied in life, and far less likely to feel terrified or outraged upon reaching the end. Such is the wisdom of age.

What was the point, then, in setting forth on some Homeric voyage in your ninth decade?

It was perhaps inevitable that at some point a trope like the bucket list would come along to help us reckon with this question. Even as time grows short, you can still do big things!

And there was some truth to this. Because it’s way too easy to underestimate our potential as we get older. Especially in a culture in which that potential is underestimated at every turn.

Bucket lists were a way to correct for this error. They reminded old folks how to think big.

Was this trip wise or foolish? How do you combine the energy and optimism of youth with the humility and prudence of age?

These were the questions my father grappled with in the days following our walk in the cemetery. And eventually he arrived at an answer.

“eek.”

The boat would set sail from the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa, and follow the trade winds to St. Lucia, in the Caribbean. The captain had made the crossing several times before, and we, with several others, would serve as his crew. Falling somewhere between the luxury of a first-class cabin on a Carnival cruise ship and the misery of an open boat, this seemed a not-unreasonable compromise.

As the months ticked by, we kept an anxious eye on the COVID-19 numbers — yet another factor in the already complex risk calculus.

By August, a different number was threatening to derail our plans, when routine testing revealed elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels in my father’s blood. Further testing confirmed the presence of prostate cancer.

“F---,” my father said.

More calculations ensued. How aggressive was the cancer? Had it spread? When did he need to start radiation? What side effects could he expect from the hormone treatment?

He consulted several doctors. Yes, the cancer had spread. Yes, it was aggressive — but not that aggressive. The side effects of the hormone treatment varied, but could include fatigue, loss of muscle mass, metabolic problems.

Ultimately the doctors cleared my father for travel. He could start the hormone treatment before leaving, and start the radiation treatment on his return.

This was hugely reassuring to hear, at first. But in the days that followed I couldn’t help wondering. Yes, the doctors were the experts. But how many of them had ever been on a boat?

My father was an ideal travel companion. He could endure a lot and still emerge in relatively good humor. This was but one of his many quietly winning qualities. I was seeing these more clearly now. At a certain age your parents become like works of art. You just stand around and admire them.

The morning after our arrival we made our way to the marina where our boat, the Skyelark 2, was berthed. The marina exuded the busy self-absorption of a bird colony. Everywhere you looked people were hosing down decks, fiddling with rigging and stowing stores. For such a dreamy breed, sailors can be unusually fussy. And rightfully so. If the rope’s not coiled right, over you go.

Every marina is a boat show. Half the pleasure of owning a boat is strolling the docks and eyeballing the boats you might have owned, and might still. About 140 of these boats would be accompanying us on our journey, as part of an annual event known as the ARC — the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. The rally was mostly for motivational purposes, to give semi-interested sailors like my father and me the encouragement necessary to commit. Within a day or two we’d be on our own as hull speed, sail area and pilot preference dispersed the boats across dozens and ultimately hundreds of miles.

The Skyelark 2 was parked on the marina’s last dock. Despite being 20 years old, she still looked pretty slick, with slim lines and fiercely raked cabin windows. But there was also a roomy cockpit where rum punches could be lazily consumed. Not that we would be drinking any. With no onboard medical expertise, risking mishaps due to inebriation was not an option.

Over the next two days, the rest of the crew dribbled in, mostly British men in their 60s — no women, which was unusual, Dan said. Almost all had either owned a boat at some point in their lives or else owned one currently. Most said they had always wanted to make the crossing, and were doing it now while they still could. One said he simply wanted to “end a day of sailing not in the harbor.” All were impressed that my father had undertaken the ordeal at his age.

We slept onboard the next three nights, acquainting ourselves with the boat and each other. The bunks were only 6 feet long, so my father and I had to switch to a cabin where his feet could hang over.

The day before departure Dan gave a safety briefing — basically a foreshadowing of every catastrophe we might encounter. Fire. Lightning strikes. Collisions. Dismasting. Recently in the Bay of Biscay several sailboats had been attacked by a pod of orcas, which chewed off their rudders and left them to drift. The bigger risk was somewhat less exotic: a valve falling off or hoses failing.

Illness and injury were even more likely.

“Move slowly,” Dan said. “Boats generally don’t break, but people do.”

The boat carried a medical kit but its offerings were meager, and helicopter evac range was limited to 300 miles. Beyond that we were at the mercy of passing cargo ships, and even then, reaching land could take three days. If you were lucky a superyacht would be nearby.

To conclude the briefing Dan brought out the grab bag, which contained everything necessary for survival in the event we had to abandon ship: various communication devices, inflatable radar reflector, signaling mirror, GPS, TPAs (thermal protective aids), passports, fishing net, water maker, cinnamon biscuits and, most suggestively, a book of hymns.

“The good news,” said Dan, “is that from the middle of the ocean it would take around 70 days to paddle a lifeboat to shore. But even if we didn’t paddle the currents would still get us there in 90.”

Among the various dangers reviewed that day, there were several that Dan didn’t mention, but we would learn about these en route.

At around 10:30 a.m. the air horns started to sound, and the boats, with a ponderous majesty, like great elephants tromping off to war, began making their way out. Sloops, mostly; ugly, blockish cats; lethal-looking racing boats; a rare two-master named Blue Magic — the naval parade went on for over an hour, with well-wishers gathered at the jetty’s end to blow kisses and holler charms to keep their sailors safe.

“Save me some rum punch!”

“Have fun, don’t die!”

“Schnell!”

The voices sounded small and plangent across the water. One by one the boats turned their hindquarters to the land and set forth upon the wide blue sea. The scene led you to open your senses, lift your chin to take in the feel of the sun, the crack of the halyards, the wind carrying spice from the tops of the waves. It was a thing to make you feel like a child again, in awe of the waiting largeness of the world.

“Quite a few masts out there, aren’t there?” one of our crew remarked. “So there’s lots of people with the same silly idea.”

On went the life jackets, up came the bumpers. Dan started the engines and eased us out. Land sounds faded to the bucking hush of water, the insistent lowing of an outbound ferry and a baby wailing over the radio. Someone had left the transmit button on, as if to congratulate us on all we were escaping.

A 300-foot warship marked the right side of the long starting line, a buoy the other, and all along it dozens of boats were jockeying for position, pawing the waves and awaiting the gun. With a call from Dan a tower of sail unfurled above us. Over the radio a voice counted down. One minute. Then the distant pistol shot.

We turned just astern of the warship and went out on a starboard tack. There were a few tense moments as another boat cut along the starting line. Then the jib was out, the engine off, and we were sailing, close hauled just south of east with about 20 boats ahead of us. On the radio, Blue Magic called in the first injury — finger severed in a winch.

My father and I sat watchful as cats as the ocean opened before us, and behind us the island of Gran Canaria faded to gray paint strokes. No one spoke. We were aiming for an angle to get around the island’s southeast corner. Then we would tack and head southwest toward the Cape Verdes.

“You can sail around the entire world in only two tacks,” the captain called out over the wind. “We’ve done two today already. It’s very upsetting.”

As land vanished, ordinary time did also, and the sea schedule clicked in. Watches were three hours long, every six hours, day and night — except every fourth day, when watch teams took turns doing all the cooking. While on watch, you and your watch buddy were responsible for monitoring course, speed and proximity to other boats — especially at night. The danger then was rogue fishing boats that ran without running lights to save power. The French, it seemed, were frequent offenders.

My watch buddy was a large, Queequeggish Pole with a rare, quaking chuckle and skin scrimshawed with tats. He didn’t talk much, and that suited me fine. My father was less lucky, being paired with an aristocratic Englishman who had unusually long tibias and a rectangular head. Tim had a friendly, sneering way of talking, owned two vintage cars with wooden steering wheels, and emerged daily in immaculate brand-name clothes, including knee-length shorts that always rode a bit high in the back.

The watch system was augmented by a seemingly endless number of rules, some practical, others, it seemed, just gratuitous enough to offer a whiff of nautical tyranny. Blue ink only for log entries. Wooden spoon only for the porridge. No life jackets beyond the saloon.

The procedure for disposing of garbage felt like an arts and crafts project, involving five different steps, including scissors and tape. The procedure for making coffee was no less prescribed. Four-and-a-half scoops, no more, no less, and water to be administered from a special bottle on which the correct volume had been denoted with a Sharpie.

“Which brings us nicely to tea towels,” the captain went on. “We don’t want 16 out all at once because they will all go a bit manky.”

To be sure, with such limited resources and so far from land, rules were to a certain extent necessary. But somehow juxtaposed with the ocean’s profound indifference the fussiness felt a bit absurd.

My father and I both chafed under the regime. But I at least remembered the rules, mostly. My father did not. He would, for instance, fill the coffee maker with the coffee pot instead of the stipulated bottle — a grave offense, for some reason. He would leave the water in the kitchen running too long, or forget to turn down the brightness on the navigation screen.

“I’m trying to keep it to one mistake a day,” my father said, miserably, on the third day. He was already at two by that point, and couldn’t remember the first.

Physically, my father had always been a bit awkward. He reminded me of a stork, tall and knobby, with limbs always folding all over themselves. He walked with a funny bounce and often tripped on his feet.

He was no less awkward socially. At events for which he would rather not have been present (all of them) he had the entirely unconscious habit, much to my mother’s dismay, of emitting profoundly expressive sighs.

He was also very funny, though often in a way other people did not recognize. When we were first getting acquainted with the rest of the crew, one of them was sharing a story about his daughter, who had recently been thrown by a horse. Her arm was badly fractured in the fall, and had to be reinforced with several metal plates.

“And the horse?” my father inquired.

This, to me, was hilarious. But the crew didn’t really see the humor.

My father’s humor was among the things I loved about him most, and most assured me that he was mine. I remember him one time reaching for the binoculars to appraise a distant boat. He held the binocs to his eyes for several seconds before realizing that the lens caps were still on.

“My George Bush moment,” he said ruefully.

A little later, the first mate picked up the binocs and did the same thing.

“Caps are on,” my father said, knowledgeably, then flashed me a wacky, Bill-the-Cat face and the thumbs-up.

No one among the crew knew what to make of him. Most of them couldn’t be bothered. In part because he didn’t take himself very seriously, I think. As he aged, he had left nearly all of his vanity behind, and what remained was just his odd, awkward, funny self.

The contrast between him and the rest of the crew reminded me of one of my favorite stories, about how he met my mother. It was the summer of 1963, and they were staying in the same dorm at Syracuse University, where they were training for a two-year Peace Corps stint in Liberia. One night there came a knock on my mother’s door. She went to open it and found this handsome, square-jawed man standing there. She invited him in, and they were just getting comfortable when there came another knock, this one from the window. My mother turned to see a bottle hanging from a string.

“Intensely annoyed,” is how she later described her reaction. But also interested, despite herself. Apologizing to her guest — a perfectly agreeable young man, no doubt — she opened the window and retrieved the bottle, which contained a scrawled message from my father, whose room was one floor up. The specifics of the message are not remembered, but I have little doubt as to its content — just a funny little piece of my father. My mother didn’t know what to do with it at the time. But after reading it the conversation of her guest suddenly seemed much less interesting.

“I have a memory of her appearing at my door shortly thereafter,” my father recalled, “bottle in hand.”

Most of all, there was no entertainment. Movies, TV shows, websites, always hurrying you on. As if time itself, or an awareness of it, were the worst thing imaginable.

At sea, time kept its own pace, and there was no rushing it. The great line of the horizon bound us like the rim of a clock. The eye settled on that line or just above, weighing the wide range of space. The space could be inhabited but never fully apprehended.

I had a great-uncle who was a sailor. He was a lieutenant commander in the Navy during the Second World War, but once the war ended he could never quite find his place in the world. He eventually became a drunk, retiring to his house on the Maine coast, gazing out at the cold ocean and slowly slurrying his mind with gin.

Uncle Bob owned a gorgeous 36-foot wooden yawl that he sailed across the Atlantic a few times with a friend. The story is, the moment he stepped on deck he would put the bottle aside and wouldn’t pick it up again until he stepped off on some French wharf. There was no need for booze at sea. At sea, there was nothing to escape.

Latch your life vest to the safety tether. Check the boat speed, wind speed, course. Check the electronics to see if any other boats are nearby and zoom in to see who’ll be keeping you company for the next three hours. Lastly, tilt back your head to take in the stars.

Beyond waking and dreaming there is a third state called sailing at night. The cool moon on your shoulder, bits of it scattered among the winches and stanchions and stays. The sea a hissing void and the darkness gritty with stars. The scale of things is no longer obvious. The mast no longer looks tall but among the stars the penduluming toplight glows like a small sun. Most shooting stars are no bigger than a grain of sand. And how big are you? You feel the hollow of yourself, a little divot in the waste.

I could usually abide the first half of the night watch in a quiet, mindless observance. But gradually the tiredness gathered, until I could no longer keep my calculating mind at bay. How much longer? Then my father’s white head would bob up from the gloom, and we’d have the last hour together, talking in low voices behind the wheel.

We talked a lot about how he was faring. Sleep was difficult, flat on our backs with our heads flopping to and fro with the roll of the boat, as if in denial of some nocturnal horror. My father had the kind of pillow that rose up on either side and nearly smothered him, but it at least muffled the ceaseless borborygmus from the bilge. It was like sleeping inside a washing machine, and thus perhaps not so surprising that he often woke up bleeding from his hand or knee. The captain seemed to abhor the sheet stains more than the wounds.

My father never knew how these wounds started. Unused to the boat, he was always bumping into things, and his old skin always tore. After the first few days he developed a new mannerism of checking his body for leaks.

One night, the scar on his nose from the last basal cell surgery broke open.

“They’re going to have to shave it all off again when I get back,” he said with a despairing sigh. Then: “I should probably just jump over now. Hell with it.”

Humor was how he coped. But humor only helped when there was someone to share the joke. When our half-hour was up he was alone again with only his watchmate for company, and the equally humorless stars.

I wished there was some comfort I could offer him. There wasn’t, and as his son this seemed the worst sort of failing. I had given him two grandchildren, which I had hoped would help ease his mind. But this was not enough.

I remember the terror of death I felt as a boy. And my mother’s attempts to console me. “You’re going to live a long, long time,” she said. “And maybe by the time you get old scientists will have figured out how to live forever.”

Even to her, I think, this sounded feeble. Because immortality did nothing to resolve the terror of death. It merely deferred it indefinitely.

Since then I had lived with the goal of being ready for death by the time it arrived. It could not be beaten, but one could at the very least aspire to meet it with aplomb. With this in mind I was always dabbling with various sophistries and notions. Of these my favorite was the pasture metaphor.

The pasture metaphor came as an alternative to the predominant, linear view of life as a brief interval on an infinite timeline. The problem with the linear view was that it overweighted the senseless void beyond life’s terminus, and then propelled you toward that terminus with the singleminded ruthlessness of an automotive airbag test.

The pasture metaphor, by contrast, presented life as a self-contained, wildflower-scented precinct in time where one would always have jurisdiction. The pasture would always be there, and whatever else happened it would always be yours.

I once tried to share this idea with my father, in the hope he might cotton to it. But he immediately saw it for what it was, mere intellectual gimmickry.

His own father had died when he was in college. I often thought about what the loss of his father had meant for him, and suspected that he might not know. For how could he know what he had been deprived of if he never had a chance to experience it? Unlike me, for instance, he never had someone to angrily differentiate himself from. No one to high-mindedly condemn, benevolently forgive, and eventually recognize himself in. This was a father’s greatest gift. In just being there for you to love and hate he helped you recognize and make peace with yourself.

My father never had that. What he had was a scant handful of stories which he would rummage through now and then. His favorite was the same as mine: the story of how his father outmaneuvered his mother’s countless other suitors. In my father’s version, his father convinced the captain of the tugboat due to meet the steamer returning my grandmother from Paris to let him bum a ride and intercept her well before the steamer docked.

This story was, I think, among my father’s prize possessions. What he didn’t appreciate was how easily I could imagine him doing the exact same thing.

Why does the heart lift so? It is an old delight, one of our most ancient triumphs — not conquering nature, but riding it. With sails heaving out and lines creaking around the winch drums, you perch with a childish glee, like a boy on his father’s broad shoulders. There is no secret to how sailing works. It is only physics, yet it feels almost mystical, like the way the sunrise, with a blue flourish, makes the stars disappear.

The crew went quiet. No boats in sight, no floating glow sticks or mysterious buoys. Every now and then a bird joined us, a shearwater or storm petrel — known also as a Jesus Christ, or JC, bird for the way it walks on water when foraging for food. One morning the watch team reported a night full of whales. You couldn’t see them in the moonlight, they said, but the depth gauge was stuck at 1 meter, and you could smell them to starboard, like seaweed when the tide goes out.

The day before, the first flying fish had floated aboard.

“A small one,” my father said. “A flying sardine.”

It would have made a good tattoo — a creature of two worlds, sea and air. An awkward creature, gamboling between.

On Gran Canaria we had talked about getting tattoos. Neither of us had one, or had ever been inclined. But bucket lists had a way of suggesting new entries.

Brainstorming hypothetical tattoo ideas was a fun pastime during those late-night vigils. The way I figured, a tattoo’s off-putting ostentation could be neutralized if you regarded it not as a message to others but rather a kind of reminder to yourself.

“Like what?” my father asked.

“I dunno. ‘Breathe’? So, maybe a lung?”

“I think mine would have something to do with water,” my father said. “A wave, maybe. … Or a boat being crushed by one.”

The talk was all speculative, so I was surprised when he came to me one day with an announcement.

“Just so you know,” he said, “I have my tattoo.”

He looked pleased with himself. This, together with the fact that he wouldn’t tell me his idea, meant that the game was afoot.

“I’ve always been astonished by people who know what they want to do from a young age,” my father said, “and then go ahead and do it.”

To his eternal discontent, my father was not one of these people. Like so many young men of a certain era he had wanted to be a novelist. After the Peace Corps, he got a job in publishing, and later debouched into public relations. Career-wise, it was a thoroughly respectable performance, but not what you would call mission-driven. Once he retired, my father began to feel the absence of mission more keenly. It was a helpless, frustrated sort of feeling, as if some final instruction had failed to be delivered. Life was extraordinary. But what were you supposed to do with it?

I knew the feeling. But I at least had him to remind me that my nature was to some extent inescapable. In accepting his limitations — and his strengths, for that matter — I was more able to accept my own. It was hard to believe that he, too, wouldn’t have benefited from the opportunity to reckon with his own father’s place in the larger scheme of things.

To his immense credit, my father was never bitter. On the contrary, he remained wonderfully and innocently and sometimes painfully hopeful. I remember him being briefly galvanized some years ago by the discovery of a trove of negatives that his father had taken. He spent several weeks printing the negatives in his basement darkroom, scouring them for some trace of the imperative that he felt he lacked. But the photos were not especially remarkable, and I expect that his father was ultimately no different than either of us: awkward, set loose on this earth with no particular mission, prone to a cruel unease.

Sailing, though. My father had always loved sailing, and he was good at it. It appealed to his intelligence, his manual facility, his appreciation for detail — and spoke also to his need for grandeur and beauty without demanding that he supply either.

That’s why when he first mentioned the crossing I knew we had to do it. And because it could not possibly be more mission-driven — clearly defined, directed and rewarding. All the things that life so often isn’t.

It wasn’t until we were actually embarked, and every distraction had dropped below the horizon, that I began to understand how the missionlessness that he so lamented also informed so many of the other qualities in him that I dearly loved: his layered complexity, his misfit perspective, his wry sense of humor.

I think that this is often true, that people whose paths are not given to them find themselves redeemed in ways they could not have anticipated. Perhaps, I thought, I should suggest this to him. The young have always relied on their elders to guide them and affirm who they are. Maybe the old need this too.

“YOU’LL KNOW you’re really getting into it when you forget what day it is,” the captain had said when we first set out.

And it was true. Already the days of the week had dissolved. If the garbage wasn’t going out, there was no week, really. One watch followed another, one sunrise followed another, one sunset followed another. The sea was what you returned to, again and again. How are the swells, the cloud reflections, the contrast at the horizon? Chalk on silver, ash on cobalt, periwinkle on denim. A distant sail puncturing the line like a little white fang.

On flat seas the sun diamonds were ground finer. On rough seas, the sun shattered into larger shards. Mornings held new colors: cerise, lavender, teal. The looking became an activity, and we built our day around it. How is it now, now, now?

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m beginning to miss green vegetables,” my father said one day.

“Not purple ones, though,” I observed, remembering the eggplants under the companionway.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m not that desperate.”

We’d learned a few things about sleeping. The optimal posture was on your back in the luge position, with a folded towel tucked under your downhill ribs and your hands tucked under your lower back. Thus propped, with elbows splayed, you could usually get a few solid hours without ending up on the floor. Even then some exertion was necessary. One morning I woke with a pain in my side, having pulled some obscure torso muscle from resisting the roll in my sleep. The biggest impediment to sleep was the watch schedule, which ensured that you could never get more than five and a half hours at a time.

One morning my father sat down beside me in the cockpit and, after pausing a moment, said, “I should tell you that I’m having a problem with my hand.”

Something about the way he said this alarmed me. The pause, first of all, and the unusually formal tone, which told me that he had composed the sentence, and consciously decided to go public with it, after suffering for some time.

My father did not, as a rule, complain. Sigh, yes — and profoundly — but by and large he endured. Partly this was character, partly constitution. He was the kind of guy who, even at 80, could put in hours of yard work, or construction on a tree fort for his grandkids, and then get knocked flat for three weeks by a common cold.

Generously handed the role of diligent son, I leapt into action, triaging him to the best of my ability, dispatching emergency communications to three doctors I knew, and relieving him of his kitchen duties for the day.

This last, I knew, was part of why he didn’t tell me earlier. He really, really didn’t like not pulling his own weight. In the absence of mission, duty acquired a pronounced importance.

“Don’t feel bad,” I told him later, after preparing lunch.

“It’s hard not to.”

“The only thing you’re not doing is cooking. That’s all, and I’m doing that for you. It’s an honor for me to do that for you. So, just accept that. Don’t let the hand win.”

“All right. I’ll try to adopt that.” Then, “Huh.”

Later, in the bunk, where all bad thoughts kept their appointments, I realized I’d been a fool to say “honor.” It wasn’t honor. It was love. But “love” was a strangely difficult word to say.

In the days that followed, more details emerged. The three sailors had taken the northern route out of Gran Canaria, braving the low-pressure system in hopes of finding better winds. In this, they succeeded. The winds reached gale force, and, late one night, with the seas running to 15 feet, Max Delannoy, a 73-year-old Frenchman, was just coming on watch when a rogue wave turned the boat and the wind whipped the boom around like a hammer, striking Delannoy in the head and killing him instantly.

This was all very disturbing. Still, I couldn’t help feeling relieved upon learning that Delannoy was the friend, and not the son or father.

10 A.M. ON watch, 8.5 knots, no ship in range for the last 24 hours. Medium seas; tumbling, white-crested summits. Flying fish puttering into the wind like dragonflies. Boat walrusing through the foamy troughs.

All liquid and light out here. A splendid monotony. Same consonants as “mutiny.” The mind wanders. Internet searches never made: What was the speed of the Santa Maria? Who was Rube Goldberg? What are the lyrics to the second stanza of “Streets of Laredo”? What is the formula for tension? Who was St. Lucia? Who was Max Delannoy? Did he have a son? Did he have a tattoo?

No ships, but we had other company now. Squalls — anvil-shaped clouds, dark on the bottom. At night they blacked out the stars. Squalls could double the wind speed in a heartbeat, spin you in a circle and then eat your sail. You’d see them haunting the horizon like banshees descending on some less lucky innocent.

The bow parts the hours. Once more pivoting away from the sun, turning outward to the stars, from biology to pure physics. Swells rolling fatly under the stern, bellying into the gullies. Dinner arrives: lamb chunks on rice. Now in the bunk performing that slow drunken dance with the ocean, collapsed on each other’s shoulders.

At least my father’s hand was feeling better.

Funnily, this was in a way what the crossing began to feel like, after 10 or so days had gone by. Shifting around our little space like floe-bound polar bears. Trying not to count the days. The sun didn’t count days. What would be the point? There was no shore it hoped to reach. To go to sea was to dip into the eternal holding pattern in which most things exist. Was this what one went to sea for? To notice this? The grind of immortality?

Somewhere north of us, the Charlotte Jane II suffered a catastrophic steering failure. Later, in the head, I for the first time noticed a safety poster illustrating various emergency signals. I was struck by one of them. “White star rocket. Three single signals fired at one-minute intervals.” Better still the meaning, terse and obscurely moving.

“You are seen. Help is coming.”

We ran out of honey, we rationed bananas. The first mate got testy when I dared to add milk to the porridge.

At night, my father and I crouched behind the wheel. Shooting stars bright as lightning left burning furrows in the dark. We were closer now to astronauts than to any other human beings. With everything so far away, it made you feel lucky to have your own dear moon so close. What else could it be there for but to keep us company?

My father shared stories from his youth. First sexual encounter — fumbling hands and whispered urgency in the middle of a darkened street one night in Montreal. Dancing on a dare with a European movie star at a bar in Germany, big band playing, mates gawking from the little table, beauty shocking to behold up close. Stalking around Edinburgh in a borrowed leather trench coat with a petite, exotic singer who called him “babe.” Him, a gawky Jewish boy from Norwalk, Connecticut.

“Had anyone ever called you that before?”

“No. Never before. Or since!”

Vistas opened. A tumbling sense of possibility. The wide sea before us.

“I have this underlying restlessness or dissatisfaction,” he said. “There are threads I should have followed, opportunities I should have taken more advantage of.”

There was something helpless in his tone, something he still did not understand. It made me feel helpless, too. Can life ever be fully apprehended? Would Captain Dan subside contented when the time came?

It was my cue to say something. The kind of thing you would tell your own son, sitting on the edge of his bed at night as he looks to you for an answer. I reached for something reassuring yet plausible — erring perhaps on the side of plausibility.

“You do what you can with what you have to offer, and the result is your life.”

IN THE morning the sun domed up a pure burning orange. Three days to go. There was no escaping counting now. As we neared the end the boats began to reconverge. Two miles off the port bow, a ketch, sails catching light like the buildings of some distant, alabaster city, a Shangri-la. And by the time we reached it, this is what civilization would seem.

A day earlier, as I imagined lounging in a bathtub filled with cold beer, my father realized that he hadn’t given much thought to what he was looking forward to. Mostly what awaited him was not good. Another carcinoma excision. Radiation therapy. And after that, who knew.

His mood darkened.

My father was at the wheel, white hair whipping in the wind, when land was finally sighted, a gray smudge — obliterated by a high wave but back again, persisting. 6:15 p.m., 16 days after leaving the Canaries. The captain requested that we keep our cellphones in airplane mode.

The smudge of land spread, the sun dropping directly behind it. By 7 p.m. the depth gauge had fallen from 1,000 feet to 90 feet as we crossed the continental shelf — the end of the Atlantic. A little smile started on one side of my face as I considered the nearing reality of a hotel bed.

Time slowed to a crawl. The sun ignited an orange line above the horizon. The swells settled and a fingernail moon rose, cupping indigo above Venus. The lighthouse on Martinique appeared, and then a liquid bed of lights.

“Do you know what land smells like?” Dan asked us.

We did not. We knew what whales smelled like. But we did not know the smell of land any more than we knew the smell of our own houses.

“You’ll know it when you smell it,” Dan said.

The land thickened, dark against the stars. As we rounded the headlands of St. Lucia a string of other peaks came into view. Someone whistled tunelessly. I felt very tired. It’s funny how tired I felt.

“For glory,” the first mate said, as we gibed around Pigeon Island.

Exotic sounds. Faraway music, barking dog, racing motorcycle engine … tree frogs.

Then the unmistakable smell of civilization. Of course. Burning, smoke. Carbon.

WHEN I woke the next morning my bunk was oddly moribund, and I found this unexpectedly saddening, like waking alone after going to bed with a lover.

My father and I spent the day padding around the shorefront, bewildered by the habitable space and purposeful bustle. It was inexpressibly strange to be able to move around people without squeezing past them as in a movie theater. To let wanton water roar from the faucet. To put something down and know it would stay where you put it. To not fear door frames, which had spent the last two weeks assaulting you at every opportunity.

There were formalities that required our attention. Paperwork, visas, travel arrangements. And of course a heap of pointless email.

That night we went to a restaurant and, over revolting blue cocktails, I shared my latest conceit.

“What if the universe needs us to notice it, because that’s the one thing we can offer? And what if this noticing were actually a kind of low-level monitoring? Like a long, drawn-out boat watch?”

My father groaned. Wrong metaphor.

“Where’s the consolation in that?” he said.

“Well, I think it helps to think of life as a kind of job. It puts you in relation with the universe, tells you how big to be, how big not to be. It assigns you a clear role. Your job is to monitor. To witness. Everything was so unwitnessed out there.”

“Where do you get these crazy ideas?” my father said.

“The point is, nothing else in the universe is capable of witnessing or appreciating the universe. That’s the one thing we can do. The universe is bigger than us, more important than us. And it’s OK when we leave it, because it will carry on.”

This was perhaps the best argument for the bucket list. To make memories to share. Even when my father dies I will still in a way be sharing those memories with him.

Which is maybe why, the day before our departure from St. Lucia, we found ourselves in the back of a crowded minivan, winding our way down the coast to a town called Castries.

The shop we sought was located on the second floor. The proprietor invited us in and handed my father a binder to browse. My father already had his idea but he couldn’t help perusing the options — a host of elemental imagery: roses and eyes and bones and butterflies and devils and ghosts and snakes and wings and daggers.

In the end he elected to go with the classic sailor’s anchor on his forearm, with the addition of three leaves winding around it to represent the family he held dear.

For me it was — what else? — the three white star rockets.

This I would bear on my chest as a kind of mute tribute. For we have all needed to be rescued at some point in our lives. We’ve all felt the animal fright of being totally lost and alone. Helpless. Then a familiar voice comes from somewhere, calling you. And instantly you are back, safe, running, smiling through tears.

Who is that original rescuer, do you think? Who is the one who sees you, saves you? Who is the one who loved you first? And how can you ever say goodbye?