It was mid-morning when Luca got the phone call. His wife and children were asleep in New York City, and he was at work in Trieste, Italy, a new city in a home country that felt foreign after decades abroad. He knew what his brother was going to say, on the other end of the line: Their ailing father was nearing the end.

Luca left the office and set out to drive the 300 miles separating him from the childhood home where the father he idolized was not going to see another morning.

But what does a man do, for five hours on the freeway, squeezing through trucks in a rented car, driving at full speed toward the worst goodbye of his life?

For the boy who watched his father get sicker and sicker for a year, the husband who misses his wife, and the father who left his children so he could provide for them, taking a job across the ocean after a layoff. And for the man in between: too young to be old but too old to be young, brave but scared, ambitious yet tired. It had been the hardest year of his life. He was lost. Heartbroken. Lonely.

“The weight … the weight of all this thing came to me, and I started crying in the car, and I just didn’t know what to do,” he remembered. So he did what had become routine in recent weeks.

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