When the doctors told us Jeff was dying of leukemia, he and I began to fight. Jeff was twenty-nine, I was twenty-eight, and we’d been building a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot timber-frame cabin on a small hill of hard ground in Vermont’s Green Mountains. For temporary shelter we used a tent, and then, when winter hit, a salvaged aluminum trailer with walls no thicker than a teaspoon turned sideways. We had no electricity, no phone, no running water, and no heat other than an open fire. But back then, difficulty and discomfort passed for adventure. And we believed it was only temporary.