How technology helped me preserve tradition in this modern world

Thank you. 3 weeks before he died, my father said this to me, I accept my fate from my maker, but I will not accelerate it. I still want to perform physical therapy, and I still want to enjoy food. My father was 82 years old. He had cancer, 5 surgeries behind him, a feeding tube, and antibiotics, and medicines, and a smoothie that was waiting for him. The day he died, he could no longer speak. He could not speak in full sentences, and he looked at the caretaker who was taking care of him and said this: "Muffin." Muffin. The caregiver went and got him a muffin. He came back and he held it and my father nodded and he grabbed it and he ate it. My father was born in a city called Fez in Morocco. He was born on January 1st, 1944. He passed away in San Diego, California on May 9th, 2026. 17 days ago. My name is Hassan. My father called me his son. The internet knows me as Dr. B, or the AI-ready doctor. And the year and a half before— between February of 2025 and last week, Or 2 weeks now, my father taught me a new ending. Not the one I was raised to expect, and not the one tradition handed me. A new one. Last year and a half was a story. So let me tell you this story first that I was raised on. Because I still believe most of it, most of it. In the Moroccan house where I grew up, when a parent gets old, you do not put them somewhere. You bring them in. And the bedroom that used to be yours is now theirs. The food that was for a number of people now are more. Your schedule bends around them. Thank you. Theirs. And there is a word for that in Arabic. That word is called al-birr. Al-birr. And what it means, it's being dutiful to your parents. That sits right there next to the command of worshipping God, Allah. Right there. And Christianity actually has the same instruction: Honor thy father, honor thy mother. And that is the only commandment of the Ten with a promise attached to it—the promise of long life. Judaism built it into the Ten as well. כיבוד אב ואם. In the Talmud, it. It is written that there are three partners in each person: the father, the mother, and God. Hinduism, matru devoh pava, pitru devoh pava, and that means the mother is God, the father is God, and that is from the Taittiriya Upanishad. Buddhism teaches. that even if a child carries their parents on their back hundreds of years, they will never be able to repay what was given. Confucianism made it the first virtue, xiao, filial piety, and that puts it above loyalty to the emperor, above loyalty to your spouse, to your friends. 6 Faiths, one instruction: honor your parents at the end. And every one of these traditions, when it imagined what honor could look like, it drew the same picture. The parent is in the home and the children are in the room. The hands are touching, the voices are close enough to be heard. Proximity. Equaled love. Presence equaled duty. The dying parent, the gathered children, the family, the village, all in the same square footage. That is the story. I still love it. I believe most of it. And, and here's what happened to that picture. The children moved. I moved. New York, Boston, San Diego, California. My sister moved. My mother stayed in Morocco. My brother moved to Texas. My father moved next to me. So at the end of his life, the people that mattered to him, who loved him, were in 4 countries and multiple time zones. And we're not unusual. We are actually typical. We are the first generation that struggles with proximity to the people that we care about. 1 in 6 Americans is a caregiver to someone they do not live and cannot live with. And in fact, 1 in 10 lives live about an hour away or more from the people they care about. So you look online and you talk to the hospice nurses and they tell you the same. Can you imagine that CaringBridge has this statistic that a new family signs up roughly about every 11 minutes to enlist somebody to care for a loved one at the end of their life? The world that wrote Bir and Kibbutz And honor thy father and thy mother. And Pitru Devo Bhava and Xiao did not have airplanes. That world did not have Zoom. That world did not have nursing homes in various states. It assumed proximity. It assumed the village. It assumed a daughter or son that lives down the street from the loved one that is passing away. and the world moved. And so if you measure love by physical proximity, every modern family is failing, including mine, including yours, and yours, and certainly yours. I refused to fail. And so I had to find a new story. My father was diagnosed with with cancer February of last year. Sepsis first. We discovered a spinal abscess, then a vertebral fracture, and then the cancer, and then a liver embolization, and then heart failure, and then hospice. 5 surgeries, in and out of hospital. In the end, 6 months of hospitalizations, 26 medications a day. And in that year and a half, I was on a more than I was on the ground. I was in a conference in Boston, he had spinal surgery the same morning. I landed in Madrid, I had a voicemail, he had fallen at midnight. I was in 3 cities in 3 weeks and he was in 3 hospital rooms. In the old story, that is failure. You need to be there. You need to hold the hand. And you need to sit in the room, but I could not always be in that room. So I built a way to be there anyway. Not a camera in the— well, yes, a camera in the room, but not just a camera. I also had like a paperclip, a loop recorder implanted that sits beneath the skin and transmits his heart rhythm to his cardiologist. With the Medtronic device next to him so it can be just a button and sent to the cardiologist who then I call and they tell me if the chest pain he has has something really bad happening. A blood pressure cuff that talked to me. A pulse oximeter that measured his oxygen that also talked to me. Remote monitoring. But not just that. A nurse that I asked to call me every day. Caretakers. Caretakers. That bring that muffin to him and tell me about it. And, and if you know me, you know I'll speak AI to you. This was an AI scribe, an ambient AI scribe. We use them now in medicine, but for him I used a normal one and he was thrilled about it. The caretaker would actually press record and— Every morning, his caregiver Justin would be with him and ask him questions I sent to him. Those questions are, what was your favorite meal as a kid? How did your house smell like when you came back from school? And do you remember the day you graduated from high school? And the AI would listen and transcribe and organize. And around 11:00 AM, the shift from his caregiver— Would finish and I was finishing the bulk of my work and then a notification comes up and it's like your favorite series, now the new episode, and I open it and I listen. I would hear him, his voice, and I would hear his laughter, his pauses. One morning I learned my father was a beekeeper when he was a teenager. My father, a beekeeper. Who would have thunk? I had no idea. You know what he said another morning? I was actually starting to listen. I was on the hallway and I heard it and it stopped me in my tracks. I was bullied in elementary school. Come to think of it, the boy probably just did not have enough hugs. What a waste. I wish I could go back in time and give him a hug. I was crying in another city. The AI did not store data. It actually opened a window, and not to a data set, to the man behind the father. That room that shrunk him to a bed, now there was no walls. And so the first piece of the new story is this: presence is not where our body is. Presence is where our attention is. That's right. And when I pointed technology at the person, not the patient, it gave me a new way to be present. Not instead of touch, with it. When I was home, I held his hand. When I was not home, the camera held his eyes. I was there both times. Now hear me for the second piece. In the old story, When a parent gets sick, you take over. I mean, you make the appointments, you pick the meals, you decide the medications. I came home one day and he told me, I got a free wheelchair. I can send it to someone who needs it. How? Somebody called and got all the information from him. What have you done? I had to lock his accounts and his Medicare and his credit card. So I took over. Everything. And I decided when people visited. I decided when he was sleeping. And I decided what music played in the room. I became the parent to my parents. And then he stopped me. That day in October, we came back from the oncologist and there was nothing more to do, the oncologist said. No surgery, no new chemo, no old chemo, just hospice. And on the way home, I asked him what he wanted. And he said, I accept my fate, but I will not accelerate it. I still want to enjoy food. I still want to enjoy physical therapy. And he looked at me and said something I will carry for the rest of my life. I said, if you could go back to a moment in your life, where would you go? And he said, I would not go backwards. I'm right where I'm supposed to be. So we did not go backwards. We went sideways, actually. I hired an Uber driver who came at the same time to take him to whatever appointment he had. Not a medical transport, an Uber. Why? Because he could ride to his appointment as a person, not a parcel. We hired a chef. I don't know if you knew that, but chefs for seniors exist. And so because he had so many limitations with his food, including it had to be thickened and pureed so it doesn't fall into his lungs. His name was Todd, and he interviewed me about Moroccan flavors. And Todd learned to make carrot soup with ginger, with mint, He made another soup with thyme and minced chicken tagine with couscous blended. And I would give them to my father and say, you smell them first. And I said, what does that smell like? He's like, the thyme smells like my childhood home. So dinner tasted like his mother's kitchen, not a cafeteria meal. Thank you. Or a hospital tray. We hired a caretaker. His name was Peter. Peter was actually a special needs student's teacher. So he would bring with him paintings and even putty. And I thought my father, 82 years old with cancer, he would just dismiss him. But no, he was actually participating. And how I knew? He asked me, I need you to get me a pencil sharpener. I'm sorry, what? My father was an educator. He was a teacher. He rose into the administration, but he was a— if you're a teacher, you're always a teacher. And a teacher needs a pencil, and the pencil needs to be sharpened. And that taught me that he was still engaged, even at the hospice level. And then there was the muffin. And the day after the muffin, He asked for a smoothie. And it was funny because I was sitting next to him and he woke up and he says, I'll take the smoothie you brought me. And I'm like, there was no smoothie. Hold on. I didn't say that. I said, oh, it's on the way. I've never ordered something so fast in my life. 12 minutes later, I went downstairs and grabbed it and he was having a date and banana smoothie. Those moments are precious. He died the next day. But the muffin was there. The smoothie was there. At the end of life, the old story tells you, take over. The new story tells you, give back. Their preferences, their independence, their agency, and authoring their own days, even if they cannot execute them. No big ways, just small ways. The smoothie, the muffin, the pencil sharpener, the chef named Todd, and the Uber driver that showed up to take him where he needed to go. The body fails, but the agency does not have to. He was a man before he was a patient. He was a leader before he was a chart. And the work last year was to keep him a man and a leader right up to the muffin. There's a moment I want to tell you about. That moment almost brought me in the third part of this story. My father's last wish was to be buried in Morocco, not San Diego, not California, where he played when he was a boy in Fez. In Islam, we bury quickly, within 24 hours if we can. We wash the body and we shroud them with a white sheet and we bury before sunset. And the family is supposed to be there, all of it. But he died in San Diego on a Friday. It took 11 days to get him home. 8 in waiting and preparing and 3 to bury him. 11 days is not 24 hours, not even close. It's the opposite of 24 hours. 11 days, every one of them, the old story was speaking to me, telling me proximity demands bring the body home, bring the family together, and hold The hands, bury him before the sun goes down. 11 days, I had already failed. And then I failed 11 more times. The news story, what it told me, while the body waits, the soul doesn't have to. So what I did the night my father died, I built with AI a website. And that website, I put the Quran in 240 parts, easy to read. And I sent them to family, family sent them to friends, them to send them to friends and all over the world. And so you read it, you marked it complete, and the site moved on. And so those 11 days until he went to his final resting place, nobody stopped, not even an hour, not even a minute. When Ottawa stopped, Dubai started. When Dubai stopped, Morocco started. San Diego, The Moroccan chants into every place he'd visited continued for the entire 11 days. People across continents. The old story said the family must gather. The new story said the family was already gathered across time zones instead of across a room. Even in Judaism, when a family cannot gather to say Kaddish in person, They say it's on Zoom. And one rabbi called it the cacophony we celebrated. That was the sound of grief. And so when a hospice physician wanted to talk about that moment, he said, the line between hope and acceptance is not a door. It's not a wall, it's a door. The Quran was a door. The cameras were a door. The muffin was a door. And that cloud and digital caravan of blessings that accompanied him was that door. Together across the world for 11 days without anyone telling them to. So I want to give you something to take home today. And before I do, I want to say what I'm not saying. I'm not saying replace the hand with a camera. I'm not saying replace the gathered family with a group chat. But I'm saying if the hand can't be there, then at least something else is there bringing attention instead of presence, because presence can be attention. When the daughter is in another country, landing, everything else, the ambient app, the voice. My father told me at the end of his life, where is my voice? And I said, it's here. It's in that website. It's in all these people chanting for you. And all that presence is alive and it extends you and it extends your agency. The old story said proximity equals love. The new story says attention equals love and attention scales. So I started with my father's words. I want to end with them. Thank you. 3 days before he died, he asked me where is my voice, and I said, it's here. It's in the AI app. It's in a put-together chapter I'm giving your grandchildren so when they're 40 and your voice is not here, they can actually hear it again. It's in the muffin that Peter got you. It's in the paintings that your other caregiver gave you. It's the pencil sharpener. Your voice is not where your body is. Your voice is where the people you love are. And the people you love are reading right now that Quran in Arabic. And the Prophet said to us, if the Day of Judgment comes and you have a seedling planted— he was planting all his life, and we are still continuing to plant for him. So A life is not measured by titles or achievements at the end. It is measured by the size of the hole left in ordinary people's lives, and my father left a massive one. And so that is the new story for an ending: presence without proximity, independence as authorship, and a global vigil instead of a gathered room. Thank you. Today is a good day. Tomorrow, I don't know. But today is a good day. Thank you. Thank you.