It was a long drive, longer than was probably wise for a man in his condition, but he insisted, and so I drove him up the winding coastal roads with a fleece blanket tucked around his thin shoulders, and I parked at the top of the bluff, and I wheeled him out to the iron railing at the edge of the world.

And there he sat, for a long time, saying almost nothing, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the sea met the sky, with an expression of such quiet, peaceful, gathered intensity that I did not want to break it.

At the time, I thought I understood what I was seeing.

I thought I was watching a dying man drink in the beauty of the sea one last time, filling himself up with the vastness of it before his failing body gave out.

It was only much later, when I finally understood who he was and what that particular stretch of coast had meant to him, that I realized I had misread the whole scene.