When the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School gymnastics team competes in the Ohio High School Athletic Association state gymnastics meet, they’re expected to win. That’s because they’ve won each year—since 2004. And as the streak builds, there’s more pressure each year on the public school’s team to continue that tradition. No year was more tense than the year that they were hoping to take home their 20th straight title.

Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.

The Civil War was a watershed in public awareness of the many health-related issues soldiers faced while living in camps. Sanitarians among civilians and regular army officers attempted to meet those challenges by addressing a range of topics associated with preventive healthcare in the volunteer army. The US Sanitary Commission, a nongovernmental agency sanctioned by the Federal government, created a massive campaign to study conditions in semipermanent camps and advise unit commanders how to avoid unnecessary illness and curb soldier deaths by disease. Commission inspectors, mostly civilian physicians, examined camps from 1861 to early 1864 and filed more than 1,400 reports of their findings.