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Let me give you an example.

A few years earlier, I was sitting in my local Starbucks when a young man came up to my table and introduced himself. In his early thirties, Mike worked for director James Cameron, who had an office nearby. He had seen me around, he said, and always wanted to meet me. It turned out that he and a couple of other guys regularly got together to harmonize and, knowing that I also liked to sing, they wanted to know if I would join them sometime. I had them up to the house that same night.

Their repertoire was mostly hip-hop, which I could not do, so we tried some old barbershop things off sheet music I found in my piano bench. From there we improvised, added tunes from Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and other Disney films, and you know, it was the darnedest thing, but these three guys and I sounded pretty good together—so good that we made our get-togethers a habit. Soon we formalized our group as the Vantastix and sang at dinner parties and charity events.

My favorite venue, though, was the City of Hope, where we went room to room, singing for kids battling cancer. In fifty-plus years of show business, I never had a better audience. Most of those little kids were bald, and a fair number of them could barely sit up in bed, and there was a sad handful who could not even do that. We stopped at the bed of a very sick fifteen-year-old boy. We tiptoed into his room and quietly sang a song. He did not react. Thinking he was asleep, we began to file out when suddenly we heard a thin voice ask, “Could I hear another one please?”

We turned around and sang a whole bunch of songs. He barely opened his eyes, but after we finished “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I saw his mouth curl into a faint smile.

As far as I am concerned, applause does not get any louder.

In 2007, Margie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A few years earlier, she had moved from the Oregon coast to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both places shared a serenity that appealed to Margie and her taste for all things sparse and natural. She loved Santa Fe. But soon she was plagued by backaches. Despite treatment, they grew more debilitating and eventually she was diagnosed with cancer.

I arranged for her to get an apartment at the Motion Picture Home in Los Angeles. All the kids were here. It made sense.

Michelle and Margie never crossed paths, but they knew of each other almost as if they had met many times. Both were strong women. They shared a mutual respect.

We decorated Margie’s place with new furniture and paintings, and she started intensive treatment. For a while, we thought she might pull through. But then she began to fail. At the end, she lapsed into a coma. For two weeks, the whole family sat beside her bed until she finally breathed her last breath. Quietly, I said good-bye and joined with the kids in crying, though I knew that in the end Margie was done suffering and had gone to a better place.

I was deeply affected. I had lost close friends like Richard Crenna, but Margie was the mother of my four children, someone who had been a part of my life practically since childhood, and even though we were long divorced, with her death I also lost a part of myself.

A year later, I was hit with more heartbreaking news. Michelle’s doctor found a spot on her lung and said he wanted to watch it. That was in January; by summer, it was determined that the spot was cancer. Michelle had surgery to remove the lower right lobe and we thought she was clean. But evidently she wasn’t; a subsequent checkup showed that the cancer had metastasized. Though devastated, we vowed to fight on.

Everyone familiar with Michelle knew that she was a fighter to the core. She’d had three or four angioplasties since her first heart attack, and even though she was not as physically fit as she had been twenty years earlier, she still had the inner strength of an Olympic athlete. I took her to the hospital every day for chemo and radiation. It was