I sat beside him for a long while in the profound quiet that follows a death, the quiet that has a texture to it, that you can almost hold in your hands.

Then I did the things that had to be done.

I straightened his blanket, and I gently closed his eyes, and I called his physician.

I felt no urge to scream, and no urge to collapse.

I felt, instead, an enormous and echoing emptiness, and under it one clear thought, which I have carried ever since: that the man my own family had discarded like an inconvenience had held on, through cold and pain and abandonment, for one reason — so that he would not have to leave the world alone.

He had waited for me.