Even in a three-hour court hearing of unspeakable bleakness on Monday morning, fragments of the light Kevin Campbell always radiated shone through.
It was the inquest into his death, staged in a windowless room in central Manchester, where a picture emerged of how desperately ill he had been before losing his life in June last year. He underwent life-saving dialysis in an intensive care unit, arrived at a cardiology unit in a wheelchair having rallied, and was then hammered again by a heart infection.
The consultant pathologist who tried to coax him back to life at the very last could scarcely believe how hard Campbell raged against the dying of the light when he encountered him on a Monday morning that June.