On Christmas Eve that year, we visited my grandfather in his room at a nursing home atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. A picture taken there shows him bedridden and surrounded by his five children and two grandchildren. My cousin and I are now the only ones still alive from that evening. Thirty-six years later, I went back to that spot and sat on a park bench overlooking the river, thinking about the last weeks of his life in a room just a few yards away. He lived from the age of hot-air balloon ascensions to the age of manned spaceflight. I often regretted not asking him what he thought about the obvious absence of moral progress concurrent with that remarkable technological progress.

— From When I Was Seventeen by Alan

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