Well. This is Heartbreaking.

The long, slow, dying of Dean Smith.

Inside the big Carolina family, he built a smaller family -- the players and coaches and staffers who came to see him as a teacher, a guru, a role model, a surrogate dad. They asked his advice on everything from sneaker contracts to marriages. He called on their birthdays and got tickets for their in-laws. He built lifelong bonds.

But for the past seven years, maybe more, dementia has drawn the curtains closed on Dean Smith's mind. Now he is 83 and almost no light gets out. He has gone from forgetting names to not recognizing faces to often looking at his friends and loved ones with empty stares.

Here is the special cruelty of it: The connector has become disconnected. The man who held the family together has broken off and drifted away. He is a ghost in clothes, dimmed by a disease that has no cure. Even the people closest to him sometimes slip into the past tense: Coach Smith was. They can't help it. They honor him with what amounts to an open-ended eulogy. At the same time, they keep looking for a crack in the curtains. They do what people do when faced with the longest goodbye. They do the best they can.

"If you have cancer," she says, "you can process it and come to resolution in areas that you need to, or make sense or meaning of your life, and meaning of what's going on, and express your wishes."

She looks out the window.

"And we didn't have that."

The phone rings every few minutes. Linnea lets it ring. There hasn't been much new to say lately. There's no cure for dementia. But people keep calling, checking, hoping. "I'm sure they think," Linnea says, "is this going to be the last time? Is this my goodbye?"

She wonders the same thing, of course. People can live with dementia for decades. They also can die from complications out of the blue. In between, most of the time, there is a vast and disconnected space. But the ones who care about Dean work for those few brief moments of connection, a smile or a song or a bouncing ball.