Twelve months ago, I received a call familiar to many migrants with relatives spread around the world. Bare Papa was gravely ill in intensive care in our Indian home town. In Hindi, Bare Papa (pronounced Ba-rey Papa) means Elder Father. He was a father figure to my dad after the boys lost their father and an anchor for our whole family.

My cousins reported that Bare Papa was looking worse every day. There must be a diagnosis, I pressed. We don’t know, they said glumly, in a story that is repeated across so many hospitals around the world. One glimpse of him on a video call and I sensed trouble. He was listless and gaunt, one limp arm hijacked by an IV. Take me home, he groaned through parched lips.

I gleaned that he had bronchitis but at 90, with impaired lungs and kidneys, the truth was more complicated. So when the doctors broached bronchoscopy and ventilation, I took the next flight to India and signed him out. The sheer relief on his face was unforgettable. At home, he was bedbound; when he spoke, it was to exult that I had snatched him from the jaws of death, an ironic way of thinking about my “healing” profession.

If he survived his brush with death, it was because his family mitigated the most brutal risk factor in old age: isolation. Their love and inclusion gave him the stamina to walk to his armchair from where he purveyed his world of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Once, I answered his “urgent” call with a racing pulse only to be given the task of finding a husband for his beloved granddaughter. I assured him that my patients were my........

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