“Oh Will,” says my sister when she lets me into the doors of Grandpa Dick’s apartment complex, “you will be shocked when you see him.” 

Eleven months ago, Grandpa Dick, ninety-three years old, spoke at my wedding. He delivered his five-minute speech from memory and stood comfortably on his feet. Six months ago, on his ninety-fourth birthday, he was still walking and driving on his own. Three months ago, he was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus and end-stage glaucoma. He stopped driving. He slept more. He walked with a cane for the first time in his life. One week ago, he fell in the kitchen. Yesterday, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. 

In his apartment, Grandpa Dick sits hunched in a wheelchair. My family watches with puffy eyes and reddened faces. 

“Hey, Grandpa.” 

He doesn’t respond. 

“His hearing is bad,” says my mom. “You need to be louder.” 

“Hi, Grandpa!” 

He lifts his head and smiles at me. “Oh hi, Will,” he croaks. His voice is a scrape against his throat—dysphonia caused by a cancerous lymph node in his neck. “How are you?” 

I do not say: I cancelled plans and drove seven hours to be here because you are dying. I think I should be crying, but I’m not. I would like to be a wreck right now. I would like to lose my composure, fall at your feet, ask every question I’ll wish I had asked when you are gone. 

There’s an awkward element in saying anything too forward, though: none of us are sure how aware he is that he’s dying. He has made passing comments about the doctors having a solution. 

“I’m okay. It’s good to see you.” 

“Good to . . . you too.” 

All my life, I have lived with a belief that because I haven’t experienced much loss, I don’t have a true understanding of what it means to be alive. So inside me there has been a curiosity for this terrible moment. Looking into my grandpa’s smiling face, I’m startled by how wonderful it is to be held in the sweetness of his brown eyes.  

Here in this wheelchair is a great living monument of my life, larger in my imagination than any story I have ever read, now wheeled into the bathroom by his children, who later leave with eyes wide in dismay at how difficult helping him onto the toilet has become in so short a time.

“I am so helpless,” says my grandpa. 

He sits in his recliner, winded from a brief, futile attempt to get up. 

“What are you trying to do?” 

“Bathroom.” 

“Okay, we’ll help you. Nose over toes, Grandpa.” 

After relocating his wheelchair closer to his recliner, my brother Spencer and I hook our arms beneath his pits and lift him until Spencer can get both arms around his torso. I move to situate the wheelchair behind him. 

“Quickly, Will.” 

Spencer is straining. Grandpa’s feet are on the floor, but his legs remain limp, leaving him and my brother stuck in a standing embrace both awkward and intimate. Neither had probably ever experienced the other like this, in such a firm wrap. My grandpa’s face is buried in Spencer’s neck, his belly snug against Spencer’s, his hands gripping weakly at Spencer’s back. 

Spencer has to leave. He has to go back to work tomorrow, back to his family in Indiana. He kneels beside Grandpa in his recliner, placing a hand on Grandpa’s knee and holding a hand with the other. He looks into Grandpa’s eyes and says a goodbye that brings us all to tears. 

It’s unclear if Grandpa is listening until my brother says, “It’s been the honour of a lifetime to share a name with you.” 

“I’m sorry you had to look like me too,” says Grandpa, and cracks a grin before closing his eyes again. 

“Hey, Grandpa, it’s Will, here to spend another day with you. I love you.” 

From the hoarse chambers of his lungs, through the haggard passage of his throat and out of his open mouth: “I love you too.” 

Speaking is a rare event now. The combination of his effort and the affection of his words makes it difficult for me to get any more of my own words out. 

In health, Grandpa always presented himself with care. He kept his face freshly shaved and his hair combed in a neat side part. He wore collared shirts and unwrinkled slacks, and never revealed a bare foot. Sometimes he wore a NASA or Ohio State cap, which was always, yes, cute. He wasn’t a physically affectionate man. He was honest, if reserved, only rarely emotional in any explicit way. I was thirty-three when I saw him cry for the first time, as he recounted the death of his eight-year-old niece some sixty years ago. There were several partings where an unnameable discomfort kept me from saying “I love you.” But I always made sure to hug him when I left.  

Now bedridden, we keep him in Depends and a T-shirt. I learn about his body. I come to know it like a parent knows their child’s. I learn the feel of his stubble on my lips when I kiss his cheeks, become familiar with the velvet of his palms, the liver spots on the back of his hands. I learn the soft warmth of his back as I tilt him to one end of his bed while my cousin Charlotte changes him. My forearms feel the give of his calves as I lift him. I spend hours by his bed watching him sleep, listening for every small change in his breath.  

He’s become like a child, and I don’t always know what he wants. It could be that this level of affection is uncomfortable for him now as it seemed to be before. Or it could be that he’s as grateful for it as I am and we have no other language. 

Throughout his apartment, on nearly every available surface, are pictures of his family. On the TV stand: Grandma Shirley in black-and-white, younger than I am, looking over her shoulder with a Hollywood grin, before children, before Alzheimer’s. On the table near his hospital bed: his parents Nellie and Jack, who braved Ellis Island and gave birth to two Americans through birthright citizenship. On the wall: he and Shirley in the throes of parenthood, doting on their children when they were still children. On the fridge: pictures of his great-grandchildren in various stages of plump toddlerhood. On the desk in his office: a picture of him and me looking at each other on the day of my wedding. There is no corner of his apartment untouched by family. 

On my sister’s phone: a video of my sister, my mom, my dad, Auntie Sarah, and Grandpa taking turns trying to replicate the aria in Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” without laughing. My sister Katie is first; she hits each note perfectly. Auntie Sarah next; not even close. Katie bites her lips. Mom next. Then Dad. Then Grandpa, whose gravelly voice is more honk than song. He collapses in on himself with laughter. 

On my phone: a video of my grandpa dancing with my mom. Before the video was taken, my mom and I had been practicing our mother-son dance for my wedding, but Grandpa was unimpressed with my ability to lead. I sat down, and he demonstrated. He takes Mom into his arms and leads her in a two-step while “Love and Happiness” by Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler plays. Partway through he says, “Here’s my special move,” and he shuffles her in a circle. “Now here’s how I did that. I place my foot here. And then. Okay?” A day or so after I took that video, my mom told me how strange it was to be held against him like that. 

Before I leave for home that day, I take the picture in his office of us on my wedding day. 

Some fragrance of his is still with me when I’m in my bed. It’s as if his spirit is spreading outward from his body, following us home at night as cancer snips his bodily tethers. In the morning, when I toss my shirt into the laundry basket, I smell him again and realize the vapour of the presence I sensed last night was only yesterday’s breath. 

“We’re close,” says my mom on the phone. “You might want to get over here.” 

When I arrive, the room is quiet. Just my mom and Auntie Beth on the couch, Uncle Rick on the recliner, and Auntie Sarah at Grandpa Dick’s bedside, watching him. 

“Hey, beautiful man,” I say and hold his hand and kiss him. “It’s Will. I’m here to be with you today, wherever you go.” 

He doesn’t respond, which is normal now. He lies there as he has been for the past couple days, as if asleep. 

I sit on the couch and read Bleak House, the scene where Jo, the homeless child who “don’t know nothink,” dies while Mr. Woodcourt tries to get him to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a dramatically different death from the one happening in this room. Grandpa is either asleep or simply unable to do anything a wakeful person might do. This drama requires no grand statements or social commentary. This man on the bed, surrounded by his family, is enough. 

Shortly after cousins Charlotte and Olivia arrive, Auntie Sarah says, “His breathing just changed.” 

We gather around him. As if a switch had been pressed, his heaving breaths of the past few days become much quieter with more time between each. We cover him with our hands; mine rests on his shin. We listen. Charlotte places her fingers on his neck to check his pulse. 

The space between breaths becomes so great that each new breath is a surprise. We kiss his cheeks. We cry. I try to hold in my mind who he was: the sound of his voice, his laugh, his deep knowledge of planes, of American history, how he always asked about the health of my car. I try to remember that that person is also this person. He is within this body, animating the heave of its belly. 

“I can’t feel his pulse,” says Charlotte. 

He is not here. 

I’m at the kitchen table. The wedding-day picture of us sits here with me, his face flush with life. I remember the startling feel of his forehead, cool as a rock, hours after his death, and how the back of his neck was still warm when I helped lift him from bed to stretcher. That body still seemed like his, wrinkled with the history of every movement and thought of his life. It still seemed capable of him, ready for another thought. It didn’t seem to me that he had entirely left. In fact, every time I looked at his dead body, before the funeral home wheeled him away in a bag, I thought I saw the lift of his belly or heard the whisper of an inhale. 

I love him more deeply now than during his life. When I write that, it seems wrong. It doesn’t ring with enough of that wisdom I thought loss would bring, which is also, maybe, why I write it, because it is the thing I have been least prepared for. In the final moment, when the immensity of his presence left all of us who loved him, he became who he would be for the remainder of our lives: cherished memory and terrible absence. Neither of those things halt love’s growth, which still says: Look at me, like you did on my wedding, with your arm around my shoulder. Look at me.