“I got a call at 11 o’clock. My mom said, ‘Well, Dad’s not feeling well — he really can’t stand.’ ” recounted Tendler’s son Walter, who lives in San Diego. “Within a couple of hours they called 911 and got him into the ER because it wasn’t getting any better.”

Mitchell Tendler began to fade. He had outlived two implantable defibrillators and was on his third. The devices had kept him alive but now posed a problem for the medical imaging he needed in the hospital. Doctors gave him some painkillers, and then he had a final thought.

“It just was quiet for a little while,” Walter Tendler recounted, “and then he just sits up in bed halfway and looks at me and he goes, ‘S***, I’m not going to see the Mueller report, am I?’ And that was really the last coherent thing that he said.”