I think the most difficult thing is to be a witness, to sit in the space of suffering with someone else and be a witness to it. I am talking about the place of suffering that does not have remedy or cure, that which is endured until it is finished. To sit and be a witness to that, to forbear, to bear, to sit in the place which is without hope. Every Sunday my mother comes to visit, and for a while I cooked for her, those things that she liked, but this has come to an end; her appetite is gone. Gone too now the urge to see other people, to talk with friends, to keep up with whatever is to be kept up with. I sit with her as she lets go of one thing and then another, and it’s like hearing a note on a piano diminuate over time. It happens so slowly when that happens, the note I mean, that even as you are listening it isn’t possible to tell when it is stopped.

When my grandfather was dying his breath would slow and become irregular, seeming to stop and then with a gasp he would drag himself back into his body, the effort of it was what struck me. How we cling to life, even from a hospital bed. It was a week like this before he died and I held his hand the whole time. The end, when it came was anticlimactic. He inhaled and did not exhale. We called a nurse, who took the butterfly down from the door of his room (at the time I thought how interesting, to have such a way of signalling) and called the funeral home, and then we were in the parking lot, my father, his sister and me as they put his body into the hearse (or whatever it is they call the car they take the body away in) and drove off. We stood there not talking for a short while and now I think we must have looked like pilgrims of a kind, come to see this thing which had come to pass. Which had passed, was now past. There was nothing to say and so we left each other.

Between the time when we called the nurse and the parking lot I slipped the ID bracelet off his wrist, and now I wear it everywhere. It’s stainless steel, and has his name and the phone number of the nursing home on it so if I wander or am come to some grief I can be returned to that parking lot, maybe in time to watch the car with him in it drive off again.

This is different, obviously, for one thing it’s so much slower, and I am here to be a witness for the prelude. I made a promise, and like all my promises, like everyone’s I suppose, I didn’t know what I was promising. Don’t be afraid, I’ll be here til the end of the line.

What did I know, what did I know, of ends, or lines, or promises? I said it anyway, knowing I did not know.