When You Don’t Have a Good Dad on Father’s Day

Twenty-five years ago, Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter spent more than 30 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won a National Book Award. It’s remarkable that a nonfiction book about disease and death, written by a surgeon and med school professor, would enjoy this sort of commercial success. In another way it makes perfect sense. Nuland recognized that a huge population was dying from the same handful of causes and in remarkably similar ways, but with little knowledge of what to expect or how…