Of course, he made it. And so began his first Mexican adventure. He grew up on that trip and came back a young man full of rich, humorous, self-effacing stories. We were still close; he still wanted to do things, but there was a noticeable shift toward independence.

SOON AFTER, AS a junior in high school, Roman was selected to participate in the school district’s gifted mentorship program. Genetics had interested him since middle school when he had read the Cartoon Guide to Genetics and pronounced, “I’m just a genetic enhancement of you, Dad.” I introduced Roman to a colleague, the lead scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Molecular Ecology Lab. She would mentor him his junior year, beginning a ten-year relationship with the lab. Running polymerase chain reactions, sequencing genes, and reading gels helped Roman pay for college and graduate school.

Working in the lab, he often listened to NPR. I asked him what his favorite show was. “Marketplace,” he said. “I like hearing about how the economy works.”

He entered Virginia’s College of William and Mary in 2005 as an economics major. He met his good friend Brad in an econ class their first year. It seemed fitting that Roman, the son of an ecologist, would be drawn to the mathematics of human ecology, but by the end of freshman year he said he didn’t have a feel for economics like he did for biology; he changed majors. He also met his first serious girlfriend his freshman year in an art history class.

Roman had kept his high school relationships with girls to himself, but the young woman he met at William and Mary was different. Following their junior year, she came to Alaska for the month of June. He shared with her the adventures he had grown up associating with family—backpacking in Denali, sea kayaking in Prince William Sound, packrafting Eagle River—a clear signal that he was serious about this girl. We had never seen him smile and joke as much with anyone. I was happy for him and thought he’d found his soul mate.

After graduating in June 2009, he returned to Alaska with a biology degree and this college sweetheart. The two moved into an Anchorage apartment right after graduation. All of his friends and ours delighted in his girlfriend. But the following spring—during the Alaskan season known as “break-up,” when the ice and snow melt and the rivers run free—she ended the relationship. Soon after, his friend Vincent Brady died from an extremely progressive form of cancer. The dual loss left Roman heartbroken and crushed.

One day, he came by the house. He stood at the door, the pain on his face like he’d been physically kicked. I gave him a hug and asked how he was doing, if he was okay.

“How do you think I feel, Dad? My girlfriend left me and my best friend died. I feel stormy and difficult, mean and sad.” His world painted black, I didn’t know how to recolor it, beyond suggesting obliquely that someday, somehow, he might reconnect with her.

After the split, he moved in with a roommate across town. I came by to drop off his things from storage at his new apartment. Three upside-down bottles of hard alcohol stood on tap in the kitchen: vodka, bourbon, and tequila ready for an easy drink. He said the liquor was his roommate’s. I had my doubts: in his room there was a big dent in the sheetrock.

“What happened here, Roman?” I asked.

“I hit the wall with my fist,” he answered matter-of-factly.

“How come?”

“I dunno. I was mad?”

No doubt he was mad. Mad with his ex, mad with the world for taking his best friend, and mad with himself, helpless and hurt with no apparent way out.

That summer, Roman collected specimens in arctic Alaska as one of a trio of scientists studying the effects of climate change on small mammals. His notebook recorded solo hikes and hunts each day. Neat, legible details filled page after page: the animals he saw and caught, the coming of autumn, the game trails he followed, and the bears, caribou, and wolves who made them. “Anticipate getting more voles later in the season as food begins to run out,” he hypothesized, an idea supported by counts of small mammals that he recorded next to his hand-drawn maps.

Roman didn’t mention his feelings of loss for Vince or his girlfriend. His notebook’s entries focused outward, ignoring the grief and turmoil inside. He described hunger and the satisfaction of good meals; sore feet and the discovery of good walking. Most outdoor adventurers turn to the wilderness after emotional loss; others turn away. For Roman it distracted from the pain of losing the girl he had most loved in his life and the friend he most respected and admired. Time would mend his broken heart, while comfort, love, and companionship could speed its healing.

WE REGROUPED AS a family during Jazz’s Christmas break from her third year at Lewis and Clark College in Portland and returned to Borneo in December 2010. Both Roman and Jazz recalled vivid childhood memories there. We went to new places, including an island resort in the Celebes Sea. Both kids were tickled to sleep with air-conditioning and eat rich, gourmet food. We participated in organized activities—even tried karaoke. At least Peggy could sing; my croaking put the kids into stitches. The staff held a competition for guests: Roman used his hands to put makeup on Jazz from behind her back, unable to see what he was doing. By the end her face looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. The two of them nearly collapsed in laughter. It was good to see Roman happy and having a good time.

Back from Borneo, Roman entered the master’s program at Alaska Pacific University and threw himself into a sophisticated thesis project building an evolutionary tree for the thumb-sized isopod Saduria entomon. He continued to struggle with the loss of his girlfriend, writing in his journal while doing fieldwork in Alaska’s arctic:

Of course everything hurts . . . I don’t want any of these feelings. I don’t like being sad or feeling crushed. I’m obsessed and angry and feel so vulnerable. No reason to write down my feelings. They’re boring and I don’t want to feel them twice. Not drinking is hard. This trip will test me, I think. I would like to see it through. See something through . . . I keep telling myself I have a high threshold for discomfort. Not sure what that means though. Need to do more outside. This trip is awesome, but I need to be moving more. Not hard enough? Need a hard solo trip, to remind me I’m weak but alive.

He was looking for something other than alcohol to resolve his lasting feelings of loss. Returning from the field, Roman worked on two scientific papers published in 2012. The article in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, “Historical biogeography of the North American glacier ice worm, Mesenchytraeus solifugus,” was a particularly daunting manuscript for a young scientist who’d not yet completed his master’s degree. The other was a technical note on the genetics of snowy owls. Roughgarden was right after all: at twenty-five, Roman was the lead author on both published papers, a bona fide biologist.

Roman’s friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers later reached out to us. Their emails and conversations helped us to see what kind of man he had become, beyond our family’s perspective. As one of his friends wrote, After Vince was gone, the emptiness settled in. Roman seemed to maintain the vibrancy of that atmosphere we had all shared with each other, his exuberance, and I was so thankful for that. Another elaborated on a gift Roman brought her from Bhutan:

It was after Vince’s death that Roman opened his heart to me in a way I had not experienced previously. He was cooking dinner and he had a gift for me. When I arrived, he pulled me aside, and he placed a set of prayer flags in my hands. He looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I owe you an apology and have for many years.”

While Roman had a tender side—nursing me to health once in a Bornean hotel while I recovered from a tropical fever—he also had a cynical one. As a graduate student at APU, he’d made friends with a group of students who’d go on to medical school and other professions. In a touching email to Peggy and me, a friend named Don Haering described him: