From the moment my alarm didn’t go off that morning until I took my first step into the hospital room, my anxiety cut deeper and deeper.

Ken’s hospital room was strangely symmetrical along his hospital bed - an axis cutting the room in two. His two granddaughters sat on either side of him, wearing two shades of green, cradling his hands in theirs. His children and their partners were dotted around the room in a cloud. The air was heavy, laden with reality and smiles in spite of everything. The person breaking that symmetry was his wife, Sally. She faced a life of off-kilter asymmetry now, a permanent third wheel amongst her children. Ken and Sally both faced their own “other side”. His was unknowable to us, but hers a second life - with us but not him.

In the evening, I went to dinner with his daughter and granddaughter. We took the air of the hospital with us like an oxygen tank and breathed it while we ate. The three of us were stuck in some liminal space between thinking about it and not thinking about it. Thinking about it but not thinking about it at all. Thoughts about Ken were left unfinished in our minds. The finished thought lay inside a bubble, and I was careful not to break that barrier while we ate.

The ambient light outside died and we came back to the room. Most of the glaring overhead lights inside were off now, leaving just one that started somewhere above his head. The light draped over the crown of his head, flowed over his shoulders, and cast long shadows from his brow, nose, and chin. It was ominous. The bubble keeping those finished thoughts at bay was wearing thin, and all of us were pressed close against it. Drawn in by a force. We all knew what was inside, and were terrified. We knew we would be plunged into it at some point.

Sally wavered somewhere between now and tomorrow. She cried for the empty bed, the closet full of limp clothes, the food in the fridge (spoiling, now) for meals that she would eat alone. She clutched his bald head and wished him to go, then pleaded for him to come home with her, then told him she would be okay. She had been standing all day. It was well past sunset when his breath grew the most harried. The rattle from his throat was loud. Sally told him to go again, and we circled around the bed more tightly, waiting to witness whatever was on the other side of that bubble. What did we see? What made us think that was the moment? That he would be gone in minutes?

We were bound in a cruel vigil, hovering by his side, for another two hours. Time was stretched and wrinkled, every second felt like an hour, every hour passed in a minute. I thought I had grasped the full realization of a life without Ken, what it would mean for his family. A life after his passing, a life shrouded in more grief, yet another trauma. Another reason for me to say “life is pain” flippantly at any minor inconvenience (it is). In those two hours, I think I was tricked; there’s two realizations. One, a purgatory of fear and loss. The second: a deep, full-bodied relief. The first realization gnawed at me as he took ragged breaths. It tore open my nerves after the nurse injected him with a vial of dilaudid. It blinded me, white and suffocating, as more and more time passed between each shallow inhale. I thought I would vomit. We’d pause, thinking it was over, looking around at each other, before another breath would drag us back underneath. It was the fifth or sixth time when 20, 30, 40 seconds passed and a collective exhale was felt in the room. Death is beautiful and horrifying. Can you be proud of somebody giving up? Be proud of somebody’s strength failing? I was.

Sally drew the covers up to his neck. “He gets cold.” The nurse came in and put the stethoscope on his chest, under the blanket. She told us we could take our time in here - as long as we’d like. We took our things and left a half hour later.

I’ve changed my mind on the afterlife. I used to feel like it was a question that we only get to answer after we die (Does the afterlife exist? What comes after death?). But now, that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care about what happens when I die. I think the right question is “where are the people that we’ve lost?”. A question where we can choose the answer for ourselves whenever we want. The people that I’ve lost are here: They eat lunch with us, they have afternoon tea outside with us. They see the crows fly home every night with us. They sit on the couch and watch Charlie Brown holiday movies and laugh with us. They listen to the waves on the beach with us. They tell us stories about their youth through the pictures on our wall. They are with us when we sleep and when we wake up the morning after. They are with us when we go to them, and start our watch over the ones that we have left behind.