Cancer
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
George Orwell
The skills you set aside years ago are not gone, just resting in a part of you that knows how to wait. When you first learned to do that thing well, your hands moved with a particular care that belonged only to you, a way of approaching the work that felt like coming home to something you had always known. The muscle memory is still there, but so is something else: the reason you cared about doing it right in the first place. What returns is not just the ability but the original impulse to be helpful, to make something better than it was before you touched it.