How a son used Jeopardy! to bond with his father in his final months of life

The New York Times

"When my father was dying — when the reality of his decline seemed to be pressing us into the center of the earth, and every day felt suddenly crucial — we started a new ritual: watching Jeopardy! together," writes Sam Anderson. "We watched in person when we could, but we lived 3,000 miles apart, so more often it was over FaceTime. I would call at 7 p.m. My father had lost much of his motor control by then, but he could still answer his phone and wave a weak hello. Out of his TV would come the Jeopardy! theme song — a bright, compulsively hummable tone poem designed to make you feel as if you were reading an encyclopedia while bouncing on a trampoline. That music was a trigger. It meant that, for the next 30 minutes, my father, my stepmother and I could forget diagnoses and suction tubes and the swallowability of various foods. We could sink together into the deep comforts of the game — the march of clues down the board, the rising and falling scores, the call and response of answers and questions. We could allow ourselves to be hypnotized by that special, rich, clear, distinctive, eternal Jeopardy! blue. The show implied a whole world: a hushed, calm, serious space in which knowledge was celebrated and rewarded."