“I think he really appreciated all the beautiful things life had to offer, but also the day-to-day things, like having lunch with his brother, or picking up his granddaughters from school,’’ said Kara Olivier, a nurse practitioner in Mass. General’s Cancer Center who was one of Mr. White’s caregivers since 2006. “I think he truly found great joy in the little things most of us call chores or daily obligations. They weren’t obligations to him. They were part of his beautiful everyday life that he loved so much.’’

Though cancer dominated his days, Mr. White preferred to keep the focus elsewhere. Interviews with the Globe let him use his story to give hope to other patients. Chemotherapy bought time with his family and provided information to researchers. A cure might have been impossible in his lifetime, but with a little tinkering, a dismal prognosis stretched into eight years.

A tinkerer by trade, he studied mechanical design at Worcester Industrial Technical Institute and worked at various companies before launching his own, helping to create, design, and improve casings for electronics and larger mechanical devices.

“That’s what Paul did so well,’’ his brother Ron of Holliston said in a eulogy during a memorial service Friday. “He figured things out, he made things work, and he helped people. Sometimes with a little cursing and swearing, sometimes without.’’

In a life curtailed by cancer, there was much to curse, but Mr. White was more apt to speak optimistically about how chemotherapy gave him more time with his five granddaughters and how experimental treatments would provide a foundation for patients he would never meet.

“He just felt he was doing his part,’’ his daughter said. “He kept talking about, ‘I’m doing this for the next generation.’ I can hear him saying that: ‘I’m the guinea pig for the next generation.’ ’’

“He was very selfless in that way and in so many other ways,’’ Olivier said.