One of my professors in college was an elderly Jesuit who admitted to us, at the beginning of the semester, that, although his mind was strong, he knew he was ailing, and that we might be the last group of students he would teach, which didn’t turn out to be exactly true, for he was still alive the following term, when a friend of mine enrolled in the course I’d been in, and attended his lectures for several weeks, although it did turn out to be somewhat true, for he died before the year was up, so that his duties at the university were assigned to one of his brothers, by which I mean a man who’d taken the same vows as him, who lived in the same community on campus, and who was an academic in the same field, or discipline, though the two weren’t related by surname or by blood.