This is in conversation from Apple News Today.
I'm Duarte Segiraldino.
Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
Esme Depreza's father, Ron, he was not a man who backed down from a challenge, especially not a physical one.
He ran 18 marathons.
He biked and he swam, and he did yoga, and he went skiing and rock climbing with us.
He had, you know, these rock hard abs and huge biceps, you know, into his 70s that most people I know don't have when they're, I don't know, half that age.
Ron grew up poor in Maine.
He was raised mostly by his mother, but he had a strong work ethic, and it paid off.
He became a Harvard trained epidemiologist.
Esme says he was fiercely independent, the type of guy who didn't want to accept much help from anyone.
But over the years, Ron's body started failing him, and it soon became clear he had als, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
This is a fatal, neurodegenerative condition.
There's no cure.
There aren't even really drugs that do much of anything to stop or slow its progression.
So, I mean, it's basically a death sentence.
When you have als, your body slowly deteriorates.
Eventually, people with als, they lose their ability to walk.
They lose their ability to voluntarily control the movements involved in even talking and swallowing.
They grow prone to choking.