The list that opens this — adopted, abused, degreed, cancelled by cancer, still golfing at 72 — doesn't read as biography. It reads as evidence. The accumulation isn't for pathos; it's for the final calculation: still standing. You built a form that mimics the obituary but refuses to be one. "Can you?" isn't a challenge. It's the question you had to ask yourself first, many times, before it could become rhetorical.