Click. Click. The front burner wasn’t working again.

Click. The rear burner roared on, as always. Flames followed the bottom of the worn pot up its sides and in time, small bubbles wiggled and climbed to the surface. Many a processed can of SpaghettiOs and Kraft noodles shaped as dinosaurs had been transformed into warm, hearty lunches in this pot. Larger bubble brothers followed and a flat red mix drained in like sand in a hour glass.

Is it true what they say, that Jell-O is made of horse hooves? How many horse hooves go into a $1.39 box of Jell-O? Can the horses give more than one hoof from a foot? Are there giant hoof farms on Indian land in Oklahoma or are there small Chinese women with butcher knives filling shipping containers in Guizhou? Or do hooves make glue, not Jell-O?

Gray’s daughter was always full of questions. Malin’s first question was simple, “Why?”

Her second question was forgotten.

And her third question was early, “Where’s mommy?”

Questions about cows, puzzles, and the color pink followed. She asked about how snakes shed their skin, where grass came from and why some days, clouds looked different. Her world and curiousness continued to grow and by high school she was infatuated with space. It was 1979 and Malin would be the first girl to pass AP Physics and AP Astrology at Holland High. She won $200 at the Michigan State High School Science fair for her refillable rocket design, along with numerous scholarship opportunities.

After college, Gray spent three years in Nepal helping to rebuild after two, 7.0+ magnitude earthquakes had split the region just days after his arrival. 4,623 Nepalise men, women and children passed on to their next lives as a result of the quakes. Gray sat in pop up tents with adolescent monks asking the same question that Malin would ask years later, “Why?”

Smart engineers like Gray saved countless lives in the following months. English teachers of course were important, but could they design circuitry and test structural materials for stability? On his return, he served as a radio technician in the Korean war. After which he got a Doctorate in Psychology from Columbia University. He counseled veterans and at 34 wed Francis. Two weeks after his 39th birthday, Gray experienced the best and worst moments of his life, simultaneously.

Jell-O is made of horses. More specifically gelatin, a product rendered from the hides and bones of animals, typically pork skins, pork, horses, cattle bones, and split cattle hides. The production of gelatin starts with the boiling of animal parts, a process that releases the protein-rich collagen from animal tissues. The collagen is boiled, dried, and ground to a powder. But because collagen is processed extensively, the final product is not categorized as an animal product by the government. Malin always imagined Jell-O was made from a mixture of chemicals, like the rest of the food we eat: methylcyclopropene sprinkled with titanium dioxide, add a daub of arsenic and a canthaxanthin dressing and voila! One imagines Jell-O to be more of a cocktail of chemicals; like a chemotherapy treatment for the cancer growing in Gray.

Malin loved her father unequivocally. She was in the business of answers and Gray, with his long full life, had supply. The questions matured with Malin, and soon Gray was making up or giving reasonable guesses on 5% of them; still pretty impressive for the level his 12 year old daughter was operating at. Soon he had to admit he didn’t know and showed Malin how to find what she was looking for in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Gray wasn’t as excited as Malin when she caught him solving one of her homework problems wrong at 16. Malin, a bright girl, learned quickly the negativity of, “I told you so.” Malin’s mother passed away at birth, a tall, square jawed Iceland Airways flight attendant who could’ve easily been a model or rugby prop. Another subject she learned not to press too hard on, but for different reasons.

It was July 5th 1999. The nurse was asking Gray simple questions while he sat in his hospital bed.

“What’s your birthday, honey?”

“What city are we in?”

“What are you here for?”

It was cancer of course and the city could have been anywhere and his birthday, well he couldn’t remember. It may have been from 23 years of chain cigarette smoking late into the night or standing too close to microwave ovens or the recent surge of cell phones. It could’ve been from cat scratches, non-organic vegetables, aluminum in deodorant or oral sex. Maybe from using sunscreen or not using sunscreen. Maybe from Vitamin E, talcum powder or Pringles containing elevated levels of cancer causing chemicals. Or maybe it was genetics or maybe there’s nothing we can do about cancer.

By now it had been six years of treatment. Malin visited as much as she could, but mothering two children and contributing to Air & Space magazine kept her busy. She asked questions as much as she could to help her father feel fulfilled, to give him meaning, so that he had a place. But over the years, the list of questions got shorter and smaller and were answered much less.

Whatever caused Gray’s cancer, and whatever pain would’ve come without treatment, Malin weighed whether the Bendamustine hydrochloride treatments were worth it. Gray’s mind continued to fade into jelly and then nothing and Malin wondered whether a few more years of life were worth losing all of the previous.