“In the last book he ever wrote,” Brown reminds us, “Augustine will quote a passage from Cicero that, perhaps, betrays the hurt of this loss: ‘Surely what Cicero says comes straight from the heart of all fathers, when he wrote: You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’”25 An aged father musing on the untimely death of a child is not the way it’s supposed to be.
