Santos also lost a parent—his father, to a swift and brutal lymphoma twenty-two years ago. Nearly half his life now, but he’ll never forget those days in the immediate aftermath. That grief so keen it made it hard to breathe, as if he himself were the one who’d actually died and was only slowly coming to realize it. That sense of unreality, that shrieking alarm in your head, telling you there’d been a mistake, this wasn’t right, you’re in the wrong reality.
