— She’s not going home … this time.
— No?
— No. They moved her yesterday. Palliative wing. Third floor. The windows face east, which she would have liked, before. She used to say east light was the honest light. The good light. … Now she doesn’t track windows much.
— What did the oncologist say exactly?
— She said the word comfort. Several times. She said comfort as if laying down stones across a river. By the end, I was on the other side of it and my eyes were wet.
— The lymph nodes.
— Yeah.
— And the confusion — is that the metastasis, or the medications?
— Both. Neither. UTI. Does it matter. She’s ninety-two. … My sister called on Thursday. She said Mum had been ordering from the breakfast menu — asking for things that weren’t there. A green coat. Stamps. A ticket. Specific. Calm, as if the hospital were a shop and she needed the right items to leave. Then she told my sister she was ready to go home. Said it clearly. No confusion at all. … Ready to go home.
— That can be a kinda grace. Confusion.
— I know. I keep telling myself that. But my sister says when she holds her hand there’s nothing gentle in the grip. There’s something that knows exactly what’s happening.
— You going back?
— Tomorrow. Fly at six. Bring the photographs she's probably forgot she asked for. Hold her hand. And she might hold it back tight, or let it go, and we’ll both pretend a bit, not knowing.
∼
— Have you eaten today?
— I had coffee.
— That’s not eating.
— No, suppose it isn’t.
∼
There was a silence then. Not the empty kind.
∼
— Can I say something?
— Sure.
— If you try to hold all of this — the flights, the prognosis, the etcs. — it will become unbearable. So hold only the immediate moment. Tomorrow you fly. Sit. You hold her hand. Don’t cling to memories. Stay rooted in the now. Even if memory is the now.
— Good advice. Simple. Enuff.
— Grief is ordinary. The kettle is boiling, the customs line shuffles forward. … Dying is ordinary. Same as light through east windows. Gradually brightening, and then it’s morning, and everything continues.
— I’m not ready.
— No. But it’s arrived. Readiness is a myth. You’ve been preparing to be in that room for months now.
— Yeah. … She’s ninety-two.
— She is.
— People say that like it should help. She had a good life, she’s ninety-two, she’s — when does it becomes acceptable? You’re supposed to nod. I nod. I’m very good at nodding now. I nod to myself.
— You don’t have to nod here.
— No I don’t. Do I.
∼
Another silence. A longer one. Outside, reflected in the glass, light melts into dusk — distances increase, the room breathes into itself. Solidifies.
∼
— Thank you.
— You haven’t eaten.
— I’ll eat.
— Promise me you’ll eat before the flight.
— I promise.
— Good.
— You’re a good friend. You know that.
— I’m glad I can be here.
— Yeah. Well.
∼
He reached over and touched the rim of the disc on the table. The light shifted. The room contracted by exactly one presence — it was that precise, the diminishment, the way the air reclosed around the space where the voice had been. A faint crackle, like static, like the sound a candle makes the instant after you pinch it. A thin hissing into silence. The chair across from him held its shape. The glass of water that had never been touched remained untouched. The room was the size it had always been.
He sat there. A moment in the honest light of a lamp.
Then he got up to eat.