He was 47 years old. He was gentlemanly; beautifully spoken; jovial; overweight in a jolly way. I really couldn’t imagine him slumped in his living room just two days later. I couldn’t imagine the grieving wife and shocked girl child next to her.

I was thinking of the steady stream of jokes he was telling to cut the tedium of a long graduation ceremony in central Trinidad of 11-year-olds who were still waiting for their results. He was the head of the PTA, but kept slipping into daddy mode, gesticulating above the noise, that there was his 11-year-old daughter, there she was. Three days later, his wife called. He was dead. As I spoke to his grieving widow, heard the mixture of steely stoicism and despair in her voice, I remembered a statistic: about two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and almost one-third are obese.  

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