Here’s a startling realization: The beginning of life is a whole lot more fun than the end of life.

Okay, I take it back. That’s not startling at all. But this is: Sometimes, the use of the F-bomb is the best possible indicator of a person’s recovery. Better than heart rate, blood pressure, or respirations per minute. Better than all those arcane lab tests.

It’s Monday morning in a hospital room in Oklahoma City. I’m sitting by as my brother Bob, 75, comes back from a medical crisis. Buoyed along by machines and medications, he’s emerging from a dark, scary place after nearly three weeks of hospitalization. The docs say he’s out of the woods for now, but I already figured that out last night.

First, a look back.

I arrived at the hospital on Thursday. Although he’d already been released from ICU, Bob was still in rough shape. But he was completely alert when the hospitalist—our own Doctor Death—basically told him to hang it up.

“There’s nothing we can do for you but extend your life for a little while,” the unsmiling creep said. “You’ll have no quality of life to speak of.”

“Not…ready…to…cash…it…in,” Bob forced out, one shaky syllable at a time.

“I thought you had a DNR, that you didn’t want any extraordinary life-extending measures,” Dr. Death said, turning to my niece, who has power of attorney. “He can’t even feed himself!” he whined. “What kind of life is that?”

“It’s his life,” she said. “He gets to choose.”

Dr. Death left in a huff. We were all disgusted by his utter lack of compassion.

A lot happened over the next few days though, enough to make me think Dr. Death might have been right. Bob was deteriorating, and the anxiety we felt as the medical drama unfolded, along with the demands placed on the family, was wearing me down.

Although Bob seemed stronger on Sunday as more visiting relatives arrived, I was pretty grumpy about spending the night with him again. (At that point, he hated to be left alone.) He was asleep when I arrived, so I read quietly in his room. When he woke up I felt slightly annoyed, the way I used to feel when my kids woke early from their naps.

He shook off a dream, gave me a kiss, and said he was hungry. I fed him the homemade dinner his daughter had sent, and, surprisingly, he said it was delicious and ate most of it. This, after his eating next to nothing for days, was encouraging. Then he asked me to switch the classical music station to something more fun, so I found a country station and we discussed Johnny Cash. He asked me to make a list of things his assistant needed to do in the coming week. It filled two pages.

At around 10 p.m., after a nurse pricked his finger to check his sugars, she whistled and exclaimed, “250! Oh, Bob, you are sweet!” She injected some insulin into his arm and banged out of the room.

“Get me a Coke,” Bob said. “Lotta ice.”

“What?” I crowed. “Your sugars are too high.”

“Gimme a break,” he said in his breathy style. “Get me a Coke.”

“Look, Bro,” I said, “you’re not croaking on my watch.”

“Fuck you!”

I felt a rush of joy as I scurried to the kitchen down the hall. That ornery cuss! He was known as The Brat in the family, but his spirit had been largely absent since I’d arrived. Could he be rallying?

I dispensed a few ounces of Coke into a Styrofoam cup. Lotta ice.

“Good,” he said as I held the straw to his lips and he drained the cup. “Now let’s play cards.”

We played cribbage till midnight—open-handed since he couldn’t quite hold the cards—and of course I shuffled and dealt for both of us. I was winning when he started to get sleepy.

 “Fuck you,” he said.

Was Bob out of the woods?

I slapped his leg, nearly knocking his catheter line out of kilter, and he drifted off. Soon after, he slept through a treatment from the respiratory therapist, and after that dude banged out of the room I settled into my plastic recliner for a few hours of sleep.

The radiology tech woke us at 5 a.m. for a chest X-ray. “You need to wait in the hall!” she shouted at me, six inches from my face, her minty breath filling my sinuses. A few minutes later, her task complete, she banged out of the room and Bob and I sleepily watched the eastern sky brighten.

“What’s today?” he asked.

“Monday.”

“What a day I’m gonna have,” he said. “Dialysis, more relatives, and the fat nurse.”

“You want me to punch you in the throat to finish it off?” I asked.

“Fuck you.”

I smiled as the fat nurse banged into the room with a cupful of pills.

“Good morning, Robert!” she sang. “Don’t you look good today!”

And he did look good. His blue eyes were bright and alert, not heavy lidded. The tube that suctioned fluid from his chest was largely inactive, compared to the gusher it had been on Thursday. His words were connected in sentences, not uttered in labored syllables. He ate all his oatmeal, even feeding himself much of it. He picked up his orange juice and shakily sipped it on his own. Was he back?

“That oatmeal was good, but tomorrow I’d like French toast,” he said. “Mix it up.”

“Okay.”

We fell into a silence.

“Barb,” he said after a while. “All my organs are fucked up. My liver, my kidneys, my lungs, my heart.”

I knew this, of course. I also knew that when I said goodbye to him in a few days there was a good chance I would never see him again.

“Don’t forget your pancreas,” I added. “That’s a train wreck too.”

He burned me with a sidelong glance.

“But your epiglottis is in tiptop shape!” I added cheerily, beaming as I waited to hear those two reassuring words:

“Fuck you.”

It’s pretty easy to make the case that Robert Moses, New York’s iconic city planner, was a villain. But he did at least one thing right: Jones Beach State Park. Here’s one way we can know this park on a barrier island of Long Island’s south shore is first-rate: It hasn’t changed. Because they got it right the first time.

Of course I value and welcome innovation. I mean, stretch jeans, Trevor Noah, seedless watermelon, hybrid cars, hoppy IPAs, marriage equality, iPods, everywhere kale—it’s all good. My complaint is that the protest “But that’s so old!” in response to my wearing a certain dress or listening to a certain album is a non-argument. It’s a logical fallacy to assume things have value simply because they’re new. This is the mindset that brings us Iggy Azalea, the grapefruit diet, and the iFart app.

I’m more impressed by that which stands the test of time.

Take Sandy Wood. She’s been announcing the two-minute radio feature “StarDate” since 1991. For 24 years, millions of people have tuned in every day to this broadcast from the University of Texas McDonald Observatory as Ms. Wood directs our attention to the night sky. Twenty-four years, and what’s changed? Pretty much nothing. (I was once so moved by Ms. Wood’s consistent performance that I decorated an Easter egg in her honor. My daughter collapsed in laughter and Snapchatted it to all her friends.)

The Simpsons first debuted in 1989, and Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are still 10, 8, and something like 9 months. These kids haven’t grown up because we don’t need them to. (I’ll never forget how we watched an early episode on New Year’s Eve in 1989—stopping the party for it because there were no DVRs—and roared because in real life, many of us worked for a maniacal man named Mr. Burns.)

Then there’s Saturday Night Live, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Sure, the comedians are different from 1975, but the format hasn’t changed. The same is true for Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” which, except for a few years, has been airing every week since 1974.

Of course, Dick Estell has them all beat. Since I was in diapers, Mr. Estell has been reading aloud newly released books in their entirety on his syndicated “Radio Reader” program from WKAR at Michigan State University. Since 1965. Yes, for fifty years. (It was through his voice that I discovered the novelist Jane Hamilton. If you haven’t read her, you should.)

But back to Jones Beach, where I spent nearly every summer day as a kid. I had an idyllic day there in June of this year, and here’s what I found: It’s the same as it ever was. I even experienced one quick, disorienting moment when I looked for the thermos of iced tea my mom used to always pack—the red one with the spouty thing that always got full of sand—before I remembered it was 2015. And that’s because, for as far as the eye could see, it might as well have been 1975.

Most fields (as the individual beaches are called) have changed little since the park opened in 1929. Yeah, there’s some Trump thing at Central Field, but that’s easily avoided. Field 6, like the others, still has its low-slung building with the sandy bathroom, a concession that smells of coffee and French fries, a place to rent the same green-and-orange striped umbrellas, and a lifeguard shack.

The water’s still dirty. (How is it that a handful of ocean water looks clear but you can’t see your feet?) People still parade around mostly naked. (It’s amazing how people who wouldn’t be caught dead scantily clad in their own backyards will bare it all at the beach.) Young guys still sell ice cream. (Now they push big-tired carts instead of hauling around Styrofoam coolers.) The cars are smaller, the radios larger, and the skin more tattooed, but none of this adds up to much. It’s really just the same.

Yes, things change, because they must: Technology improves, resources grow scant, we get bored, we evolve. But let’s take a moment to appreciate those rarities that don’t change because someone got it right the first time.

After eight years of writing, nurturing, and fussing over my first novel, primping it and reminding it to behave, today it enters the big wide world. I’m incredibly proud of this grown-up book and I’m getting a little teary-eyed watching it leave home.

One might expect that today, its official release date, would be its birthday, but it doesn’t feel that way. The book was conceived in 2007 with a germ of an idea, born in late 2014 when the first advance reader copies were released, and today it flies. It has its own life now and I can’t protect it any more.

What’s even more terrifying, though, is that I’m in charge of promoting it. Whose idea was this, anyway? Oh yeah, mine.

Could this task have fallen to a more unlikely person?

I was telling my sister Madeline the other day how I have a booksigning at COAS Books in Las Cruces, NM, on July 25. Before I could say another word, she said, “Wear a statement necklace, something large and unforgettable, and a plain black dress. Wear that necklace at all your signings. You’ll need an obvious image that people associate with you.”

When I mentioned to my niece Theadora that today was the release date, she said, “Come with me—you need a photo. Wear this. Sit there. Hold the books this way. Are you happy about the book? Then show it.” Click, click, done.

A few nights ago, while celebrating the book’s imminent release with old friends, all of whom bought a copy, Eileen called out across the bar, “My friend here just wrote a book!” People raised their glasses and the bartender bought me a beer. I slinked away to the rest room. When I returned, Deirdre handed me $30 and said,  “Those people over there just bought two books!” No more sold for the rest of the night because, you know, I was in charge.

Clearly my family and friends are more natural marketers than I am. And clearly, this needs to change.

Some time ago while cleaning my house, I discovered a spider living under a potted plant. “What is your problem?” I scolded as it scuttled away from the sudden light. “How do you expect to make a living here? You expect a mosquito to crawl under this thing and snare itself in your web? You expect a volunteer fly to zip by? Haven’t you ever heard of market positioning?” It wasn’t interested.

I’m trying really hard not to be that stupid spider, but it’s hard going against your own nature. Being an extrovert isn’t the same as tooting your own horn. And most writers tend to be observers—we might be chatty, but we generally like to hang back some; schmoozing too much interferes with that. The famously reclusive J.D. Salinger had no Pinterest boards, we all know that Jonathan Franzen hates the internet, and I assume that my heroes Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison employ their own crack publicists. But last time I checked, I’m not quite as well known as those folks.

But this is serious. The book I’m launching today, Love and Death in a Perfect World, must succeed, or why would I bother writing it? You don’t send a kid to college just so she can hole up in a dorm room and sleep for four years. It’s time for this book to make its way in the world. So here goes.

Love and Death in a Perfect World is available today on Amazon. It’s a great book, a book that will make you wonder why you think what you think and feel what you feel. A book that, through an authentic portrait of a woman named Rosemary, explores the baffling gift of life, the mystery of love, and the burden of death. It will make you laugh and cry.

But don’t take my word for it. Buy it. Request it at your local bookstore—it’s available to them through Ingram—or buy it on Amazon.

And let me know what you think!