In 1946, on learning that his sister's seventeen-year-old son Billy was dying of cancer in Barbados, Neville — with no fast way to travel there himself, since there were only week-long boat crossings and no telephone link between New York and Barbados at the time — lay on his own bed in New York and imagined himself present in his family's home, lying in Billy's bed in Billy's place, intending to show his sister that nothing truly dies. A week later she wrote to him, deeply shaken: she had gone in to check on Billy and, opening and closing her eyes again and again, could see only Neville lying there instead of her son, unable to explain what she had seen.