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My father, an avid amateur golfer, teetotaler, and sugar abstainer, calls me on a Thursday. Which immediately strikes me as odd because we talk every Saturday morning and text about college basketball games in between. I assume someone is very ill or dead.

I answer on the first ring with trepidation. “Hello, Dad?”

He responds with our running joke. “Helloooooo, Newman!” He’s a bit of a Seinfeld addict.

“What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, jovially. Then an uncertainty crowds out the joy. “Well, sort of.”

My anxiety level ratchets up a couple of notches. Dad has had a few run-ins with skin cancer over the past couple of years. All that time on the wide open fairways of golf courses minus sunscreen–“What did we know about sunscreen in the Seventies?” he jokes–causes basal cell carcinoma to pop up in exposed spots. He’s had patches of scaly growth cut off his nose twice, forehead once, ear three times. The most recent surgery dug out a good chunk of his forearm.

“What does that even mean–sort of? Do you have more cancer?”

“Probably!” I can hear the attempt at lightness in his voice. “But it isn’t that this time.”

Now I’m really worried. “Is it something more serious?”

“Well,” he hedges a moment, then the words tumble out in a rush. “It’s my heart again.”

My blood chills and my stomach drops. In 2019, my father received a strange diagnosis out of the blue: During a routine stress test, the doctor noticed a heart murmur no one else had in the previous 75 years of Dad’s life. There was some talk of medication or angioplasty should the anomaly persist or deepen into chest pain. It hadn’t.

“Does it hurt?” My father has a habit of keeping symptoms to himself. “How long?”

“No, no,” he assures me. “Nothing like that. It’s just that the murmur is…louder.”

“What are they going to do about that?”

“Nothing yet. We’ll keep watching it.” There’s a mild defeat in his tone. “But now I have to go have it listened to every three months.”

I sit with that news for a few moments, parsing how serious this is in reality, not just in my dad’s thick head.

“Does it limit any activity?” I finally ask.

“Nah,” he says. Then, with all the bullshit optimism of a man who is facing his own mortality, he launches into a terrible rendition of Celine Dion’s most famous lyric. “Myyyyyyy heart will go onnnnnnn…”

We both force laughs. We know these are numbered.